If this is a man --Primo Levi

If this is a man

by Primo Levi

Translated from the Italian by Stuart Woolf

The Orion Press / New York

All rights reserved

© 1959 by The Orion Press, Inc. - New York

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-13327
Manufactured in Italy

Translated from Se questo e un uomo, Copyright ©
by Giulio Einaudi editore S.p.A.

1958

CONTENTS

The Journey.

page

3

On the Bottom.

14

Initiation.

35

Ka-Be.

41

Our Nights.-

. . . . 59

The Work.

71

A Good Day >.

. . . . 79

This Side of Good and Evil .

87

The Drowned and the Saved

. 99

Chemical Examination ....

. 117

The Canto of Ulysses ....

. 127

The Events of the Summer .

. 135

October 1944 .

. 143

Kraus.

. 153

Die drei Leute vom Labor

. 159

The Last One.

171

The Story of Ten Days ....

. 179

i.

The Journey

I was captured by the Fascist Militia on December
13, 1943. I was twenty four, with little wisdom, no
experience, and a decided tendency — encouraged by the
life of segregation forced on me for the previous four
years by the racial laws — to live in an unrealistic world
of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phan¬
toms, by sincere male and bloodless ^male friendships.
I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion.

It had been by no means easy to flee into the mountains
and to help set up what, both in my opinion and in that
of friends little more experienced than myself, should
have become a partisan band affiliated with the Resistance
movement Justice and Liberty. Contacts, arms, money and
the experience needed to acquire them were all missing.
We lacked capable men, and instead we were swamped
by a deluge of outcasts, in good or bad faith, who came
from the plain in search of a non-existent military or
political organization, of arms, or merely of protection,
a hiding place, a fire, a pair of shoes.

At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine

If This is a Man

I was later to learn so hurriedly in the Lager: that man
is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means,
while he who errs but once pays dearly. So that I can
only consider the following sequence of events justified.
Three Fascist Militia companies, which had set out in
the night to surprise a much more powerful and dangerous
band than ours, broke into our refuge one spectral snowy
dawn and took me down to the valley as a suspect
person.

During the interrogations that followed, I preferred
to admit my status of “ Italian citizen of Jewish race.”
I felt that otherwise I would be unable to justify my
presence in places too secluded even for an evacuee;
while I believed (wrongly as was subsequently seen) that
the admission of my political activity would have meant
torture and certain death. As a Jew, I was sent to Fossoli,
near Modena, where a vast detention camp, originally
meant for English and American prisoners-of-war,
collected all the numerous categories of people not
approved of by the new-born Fascist Republic.

At the moment of my arrival, that is, at the end of
January, 1944, there were about one hundred and fifty
Italian Jews in the camp, but within a few weeks their
number rose to over six hundred. For the most part
they consisted of entire families captured by the Fascists
or Nazis through their imprudence or following secret
accusations. A few had given themselves up sponta¬
neously, reduced to desperation by the vagabond life,
or because they lacked the means to survive, or to
avoid separation from a captured relation, or even —
absurdly — “to be in conformity with the law.” There
were also about a hundred Jugoslavian military internees
and a few other foreigners who were politically suspect.

The arrival of a squad of German SS men should
have made even the optimists doubtful; but we still

4

The Journey

managed to interpret the novelty in various ways without
drawing the most obvious conclusions. Thus, despite
everything, the announcement of the deportation caught
us all unawares.

On February 20, the Germans had inspected the
camp with care and had publicly and loudly upbraided
the Italian commissar for the defective organization of
the kitchen service and for the scarce amount of wood
distributed for heating; they even said that an infirmary
would soon be opened. But on the morning of the 21st
we learned that on the following day the Jews would be
leaving. All the Jews, without exception. Even the
children, even the old, even the ill. Our destination?
Nobody knew. We should be prepared for a fortnight
of travel. For every person missing at the roll-call, ten
would be shot.

Only a minority of ingenuous and deluded souls
continued to hope; we others had often spoken with
the Polish and Croat refugees and we knew what
departure meant.

For people condemned to death, tradition prescribes
an austere ceremony, calculated to emphasize that all
passions and anger have died down, and that the act of
justice represents only a sad duty towards society which
moves even the executioner to pity for the victim. Thus
the condemned man is shielded from all external cares,
he is granted solitude and, should he want it, spiritual
comfort; in short, care is taken that he should feel
around him neither hatred nor arbitrariness, only necessity
and justice, and by means of punishment, pardon.

But to us this was not granted, for we were many
and time was short. And in any case, what had we to
repent, for what crime did we need pardon? The Italian
commissar accordingly decreed that all services should
continue to function until the final notice: the kitchens

5

If This is a Man

remained open, the corvees for cleaning worked as usual,
and even the teachers of the little school gave lessons
until the evening, as on other days. But that evening the
children were given no homework.

And night came, and it was such a night that one
knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive.
Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian
nor German, had the courage to come and see what men
do when they know they have to die.

All took leave from life in the manner which most
suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk,
others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the
mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey
with tender care, and washed their children and packed
the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of
children’s washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor
did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the
hundred other small things which mothers remember and
which children always need. Would you not do the
same? If you and your child were going to be killed
tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?

In hut 6A old Gattegno lived with his wife and
numerous children and grandchildren and his sons and
daughters-in-law. All the men were carpenters; they had
come from Tripoli after many long journeys, and had
always carried with them the tools of their trade, their
kitchen utensils, and their accordions and violins to play
and dance to after the day’s work. They were happy
and pious folk. Their women were the first to silently
and rapidly finish the preparations for the journey in
order to have time for mourning. When all was ready,
the food cooked, the bundles tied together, they unloos¬
ened their hair, took off their shoes, placed the Yahrzeit
candles on the ground and lit them according to the
customs of their fathers, and sat on the bare soil in a

6

The Journey

circle for the lamentations, praying and weeping all the
night. We collected in a group in front of their door,
and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new
for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land,
the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed
every century.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as
though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to
assist in our destruction. The different emotions that
overcame us, of resignation, of futile rebellion, of
religious abandon, of fear, of despair, now joined together
after a sleepless night in a collective, uncontrolled panic.
The time for meditation, the time for decision was over,
and all reason dissolved into a tumult, across which
flashed the happy memories of our homes, still so near
in time and space, as painful as the thrusts of a sword.

Many things were then said and done among us;
but of these it is better that there remain no memory.

With the absurd precision to which we later had to
accustom ourselves, the Germans held the roll-call. At
the end the officer asked ''‘‘Wieviel Stuck?" The corporal
saluted smartly and replied that there were six hundred
and fifty “pieces” and that all was in order. They then
loaded us on to the buses and took us to the station of
Carpi. Here the train was waiting for us, with our escort
for the journey. Here we received the first blows: and it
was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither
in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how
can one hit a man without anger?

There were twelve goods wagons for six hundred and
fifty men; in mine we were only forty-five, but it was
a small wagon. Here then, before our very eyes, under
our very feet, was one of those notorious transport trains,

7

If This is a Man

those which never return, and of which, shuddering and
always a little incredulous, we had so often heard speak.
Exactly like this, detail for detail: goods wagons closed
from the outside, with men, women and children pressed
together without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a
journey towards nothingness, a journey down there,
towards the bottom. This time it is us who are inside.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect
happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause
to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is
equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the real¬
ization of both these extreme states are of the same nature:
they derive from our human condition which is opposed
to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge
of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one
instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the
following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for
it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief.
The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison
every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract
us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of
them intermittent and hence supportable.

It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the
thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair,
both during the journey and after. It was not the will
to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men
capable of such resolution, and we were but a common
sample of humanity.

The doors had been closed at once, but the train
did not move until evening. We had learnt of our
destination with relief. Auschwitz: a name without
significance for us at that time, but it at least implied
some place on this earth.

The train travelled slowly, with long, unnerving halts.

8

The Journey

Through the slit we saw the tall pale cliffs of the Adige
Valley and the names of the last Italian cities disappear
behind us. We passed the Brenner at midday of the
second day and everyone stood up, but no one said a
word. The thought of the return journey stuck in my
heart, and I cruelly pictured to myself the inhuman joy
of that other journey, with doors open, no one wanting
to flee, and the first Italian names... and I looked around
and wondered how many, among that poor human dust,
would be struck by fate. Among the forty-five people
in my wagon only four saw their homes again; and it was
by far the most fortunate wagon.

We suffered from thirst and cold; at every stop we
clamoured for water, or even a handful of snow, but we
were rarely heard; the soldiers of the escort drove off
anybody who tried to approach the convoy. Two young
mothers, nursing their children, groaned night and day,
begging for water. Our state of nervous tension made
the hunger, exhaustion and lack of sleep seem less of a
torment. But the hours of darkness were nightmares
without end.

There are few men who know how to go to their
deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom
one would expect. Few know how to remain silent and
respect the silence of others. Our restless sleep was often
interrupted by noisy and futile disputes, by curses, by
kicks and blows blindly delivered to ward off some
encroaching and inevitable contact. Then someone would
light a candle, and its mournful flicker would reveal
an obscure agitation, a human mass, extended across the
floor, confused and continuous, sluggish and aching, rising
here and there in sudden convulsions and immediately
collapsing again in exhaustion.

Through the slit, known and unknown names of
Austrian cities, Salzburg, Vienna, then Czech, finally

9

If This is a Man

Polish names. On the evening of the fourth day the
cold became intense: the train ran through interminable
black pine forests, climbing perceptibly. The snow was
high. It must have been a branch line as the stations
were small and almost deserted. During the halts, no
one tried anymore to communicate with the outside world:
we felt ourselves by now “on the other side.” There was
a long halt in open country. The train started up with
extreme slowness, and the convoy stopped for the last
time, in the dead of night, in the middle of a dark
silent plain.

On both sides of the track rows of red and white
lights appeared as far as the eye could see; but there was
none of that confusion of sounds which betrays inhabited
places even from a distance. By the wretched light of
the last candle, with the rhythm of the wheels, with
every human sound now silenced, we awaited what was
to happen.

Next to me, crushed against me for the whole journey,
there had been a woman. We had known each other
for many years, and the misfortune had struck us
together, but we knew little of each other. Now, in the
hour of decision, we said to each other things that are
never said among the living. We said farewell and it
was short; everybody said farewell to life through his
neighbour. We had no more fear.

The climax came suddenly. The door opened with
a crash, and the dark echoed with outlandish orders in
that curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command
which seems to give vent to a millenial anger. A vast
platform appeared before us, lit up by reflectors. A little
beyond it, a row of lorries. Then everything was silent
again. Someone translated: we had to climb down with
our luggage and deposit it alongside the train. In a

10

The Journey

moment the platform was swarming with shadows. But
we were afraid to break that silence: everyone busied
himself with his luggage, searched for someone else,
called to somebody, but timidly, in a whisper.

A dozen SS men stood around, legs akimbo, with an
indifferent air. At a certain moment they moved among
us, and in a subdued tone of voice, with faces of stone,
began to interrogate us rapidly, one by one, in bad
Italian. They did not interrogate everybody, only a few:
“How old? Healthy or ill?” And on the basis of the
reply they pointed in two different directions.

Everything was as silent as an aquarium, or as in
certain dream sequences. We had expected something
more apocalyptic: they seemed simple police agents. It
was disconcerting and disarming. Someone dared to ask
for his luggage: they replied, “luggage afterwards.”
Someone else did not want to leave his wife: they said,
“together again afterwards.” Many mothers did not
want to be separated from their children: they said
“good, good, stay with child.” They behaved with the
calm assurance of people doing their normal duty of
every day. But Renzo stayed an instant too long to say
goodbye to Francesca, his fiancee, and with a single blow
they knocked him to the ground. It was their everyday
duty.

In less than ten minutes all the fit men had been
collected together in a group. What happened to the
others, to the women, to the children, to the old men,
we could establish neither then nor later: the night
swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today, however,
we know that in that rapid and summary choice each
one of us had been judged capable or not of working
usefully for the Reich; we know that of our convoy
no more than ninety-six men and twenty-nine women
entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and

11

If This is a Man

Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five
hundred in number, not one was living two days later.
We also know that not even this tenuous principle of
discrimination between fit and unfit was always followed,
and that later the simpler method was often adopted
of merely opening both the doors of the wagon
without warning or instructions to the new arrivals.
Those who by chance climbed down on one side of the
convoy entered the camp; the others went to the gas
chamber.

This is the reason why three-year-old Emilia died:
the historical necessity of killing the children of Jews
was self-demonstrative to the Germans. Emilia, daughter
of Aldo Levi of Milan, was a curious, ambitious, cheerful,
intelligent child; her parents had succeeded in washing
her during the journey in the packed car in a tub with
tepid water which the degenerate German engineer had
allowed them to draw from the engine that was dragging
us all to death.

Thus, in an instant, our women, our parents, our
children disappeared. We saw them for a short while
as an obscure mass at the other end of the platform;
then we saw nothing more.

Instead, two groups of strange individuals emerged
into the light of the lamps. They walked in squads, in
rows of three, with an odd, embarassed step, head
dangling in front, arms rigid. On their heads they wore
comic berets and were all dressed in long striped overcoats,
which even by night and from a distance looked filthy
and in rags. They walked in a large circle around us,
never drawing near, and in silence began to busy them¬
selves with our luggage and to climb in and out of the
empty wagons.

We looked at each other without a word. It was
all incomprehensible and mad, but one thing we had

12

The Journey

understood. This was the metamorphosis that awaited
us. Tomorrow we would be like them.

Without knowing how I found myself loaded on to a
lorry with thirty others; the lorry sped into the night at
full speed. It was covered and we could not see outside,
but by the shaking we could tell that the road had many
curves and bumps. Are we unguarded? Throw ourselves
down? It is too late, too late, we are all “down.”
In any case we are soon aware that we are not without
guard. He is a strange guard, a German soldier bristling
with arms. We do not see him because of the thick
darkness, but we feel the hard contact every time that
a lurch of the lorry throws us all in a heap. At a certain
point he switches on a pocket torch and instead of
shouting threats of damnation at us, he asks us courte¬
ously, one by one, in German and in pidgin language,
if we have any money or watches to give him, seeing
that they will not be useful to us anymore. This is
no order, no regulation: it is obvious that it is a small
private initiative of our Charon. The matter stirs us to
anger and laughter and brings relief.

13

On the bottom

The journey did not last more than twenty minutes.
Then the lorry stopped, and we saw a large door, and
above it a sign, brightly illuminated (its memory still
strikes me in my dreams): Arbeit Macht Frei, work gives
freedom.

We climb down, they make us enter an enormous
empty room that is poorly heated. We have a terrible
thirst. The weak gurgle of the water in the radiators
makes us ferocious; we have had nothing to drink for
four days. But there is also a tap — and above it a card
which says that it is forbidden to drink as the water
is dirty. Nonsense. It seems obvious that the card
is a joke, “they" know that we are dying ol thirst and
they put us in a room, and there is a tap, and Wasser-
trinken Verboten. I drink and I incite my companions
to do likewise, but I have to spit it out, the water is
tepid and sweetish, with the smell of a swamp.

This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like
this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on
our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink

15

If This is a Man

the water, and we wait for something which will certainly
be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues
to happen. What can one think about? One cannot
think anymore, it is like being already dead. Someone
sits down on the ground. The time passes drop by drop.

We are not dead. The door is opened and an SS
man enters, smoking. He looks at us slowly and asks,
“Wer kann Deutsch?” One of us whom I have never
seen, named Flesch, moves forward; he will be our
interpreter. The SS man makes a long calm speech;
the interpreter translates. We have to form rows of five,
with intervals of two yards between man and man; then
we have to undress and make a bundle of the clothes
in a special manner, the woollen garments on one side,
all the rest on the other; we must take off our shoes
but pay great attention that they are not stolen.

Stolen by whom? Why should our shoes be stolen?
And what about our documents, the few things we have
in our pockets, our watches? We all look at the
interpreter, and the interpreter asks the German, and
the German smokes and looks him through and through
as if he were transparent, as if no one had spoken.

I had never seen old men naked. Mr. Bergmann
wore a truss and asked the interpreter if he should take
it off, and the interpreter hesitated. But the German
understood and spoke seriously to the interpreter pointing
to someone. We saw the interpreter swallow and then
he said: “The officer says, take off the truss, and you
will be given that of Mr. Coen.” One could see the
words coming bitterly out of Flesch’s mouth; this was
the German manner of laughing.

Now another German comes and tells us to put the
shoes in a certain corner, and we put them there, because
now it is all over and we feel outside this world and the
only thing is to obey. Someone comes with a broom

16

On the Bottom

and sweeps away all the shoes, outside the door in a
heap. He is crazy, he is mixing them all together,
ninety-six pairs, they will be all mixed up. The outside
door opens, a freezing wind enters and we are naked
and cover ourselves up with our arms. The wind blows
and slams the door; the German reopens it and stands
watching with interest how we writhe to hide from the
wind, one behind the other. Then he leaves and closes it.

Now the second act begins. Four men with razors,
soap-brushes and clippers burst in; they have trousers and
jackets with stripes, with a number sewn on the front;
perhaps they are the same sort as those others of this
evening (this evening or yesterday evening?); but these
are robust and flourishing. We ask many questions but
they catch hold of us and in a moment we find ourselves
shaved and sheared. What comic faces we have without
hair! The four speak a language which does not seem
of this world. It is certainly not German, for I under¬
stand a little German.

Finally another door is opened: here we are, locked
in, naked, sheared and standing, with our feet in water —
it is a shower-room. We are alone. Slowly the aston¬
ishment dissolves, and we speak, and everyone asks
questions and no one answers. If we are naked in a
shower-room, it means that we will have a shower. If
we have a shower it is because they are not going to
kill us yet. But why then do they keep us standing,
and give us nothing to drink, while nobody explains
anything, and we have no shoes or clothes, but we are
all naked with our feet in the water, and we have been
travelling five days and cannot even sit down.

And our women?

Mr. Levi asks me if I think that our women are
like us at this moment, and where they are, and if we
will be able to see them again. I say yes, because he is

17

If This is a Man

married and has a daughter; certainly we will see them
again. But by now my belief is that all this is a game
to mock and sneer at us. Clearly they will kill us, who¬
ever thinks he is going to live is mad, it means that
he has swallowed the bait, but I have not; I have
understood that it will soon all be over, perhaps in this
same room, when they get bored of seeing us naked,
dancing from foot to foot and trying every now and again
to sit down on the floor. But there are two inches of cold
water and we cannot sit down.

We walk up and down without sense, and we talk,
everybody talks to everybody else, we make a great
noise. The door opens, and a German enters; it is the
officer of before. He speaks briefly, the interpreter
translates. “The officer says you must be quiet, because
this is not a rabbinical school.” One sees the words which
are not his, the bad words, twist his mouth as they come
out, as if he was spitting out a foul taste. We beg him
to ask what we are waiting for, how long we will stay
here, about our women, everything; but he says no, that
he does not want to ask. This Flesch, who is most
unwilling to translate into Italian the hard cold German
phrases and refuses to turn into German our questions
because he knows that it is useless, is a German Jew
of about fifty, who has a large scar on his face from a
wound received fighting the Italians on the Piave. He
is a closed, taciturn man, for whom I feel an instinctive
respect as I feel that he has begun to suffer before us.

The German goes and we remain silent, although we
are a little ashamed of our silence. It is still night and
we wonder if the day will ever come. The door opens
again, and someone else dressed in stripes comes in. He
is different from the others, older, with glasses, a more
civilized face, and much less robust. He speaks to us in
Italian.

18

On the Bottom

(By now we are tired of being amazed. We seem
to be watching some mad play, one of those plays in
which the witches, the Holy Spirit and the devil appear.
He speaks Italian badly, with a strong foreign accent.
He makes a long speech, is very polite, and tries to reply
to all our questions.

We are at Monowitz, near Auschwitz, in Upper
Silesia, a region inhabited by both Poles and Germans.
This camp is a work-camp, in German one says Arheits-
lager; all the prisoners (there are about ten thousandj
work in a factory which produces a type of rubber called
Buna, so that the camp itself is called Buna.

We will be given shoes and clothes — no, not our
own, — other shoes, other clothes, like his. We are
naked now because we are waiting for the shower and
the disinfection, which will take place immediately after
the reveille, because one cannot enter the camp without
being disinfected.

Certainly there will be work to do, everyone must
work here. But there is work and work: he, for
example, acts as doctor. He is a Hungarian doctor who
studied in Italy and he is the dentist of the Lager. He
has been in the Lager for four and a half years (not
in this one: Buna has only been open for a year and a
half), but we can see that he is still quite well, not
very thin. Why is he in the Lager? Is he Jewish like
us? “No,” he says simply, “I am a criminal.”

We ask him many questions. He laughs, replies to
some and not to others, and it is clear that he avoids
certain subjects. He does not speak of the women: he
says they are well, that we will see them again soon, but
he does not say how or where. Instead he tells us other
things, strange and crazy things, perhaps he too is playing
with us. Perhaps he is mad — one goes mad in the Lager.
He says that every Sunday there are concerts and football

19

If This is a Man

matches. He says that whoever boxes well can become
cook. He says that whoever works well receives prize-
coupons with which to buy tobacco and soap. He says
that the water is really not drinkable, and that instead
a coffee substitute is distributed every day, but generally
nobody drinks it as the soup itself is sufficiently watery
to quench thirst. We beg him to find us something to
drink, but he says that he cannot, that he has come to see
us secretly, against SS orders, as we still have to be
disinfected, and that he must leave at once; he has come
because he has a liking for Italians, and because, he says,
he “has a little heart.” We ask him if there are other
Italians in the camp and he says there are some, a few,
he does not know how many; and he at once changes the
subject. Meanwhile a bell rang and he immediately
hurried off and left us stunned and disconcerted. Some
feel refreshed but I do not. I still think that even this
dentist, this incomprehensible person, wanted to amuse
himself at our expense, and I do not want to believe a
word of what he said.

At the sound of the bell, we can hear the still dark
camp waking up. Unexpectedly the water gushes out
boiling from the showers — five minutes of bliss; but
immediately after, four men (perhaps they are the barb¬
ers) burst in yelling and shoving and drive us out, wet
and steaming, into the adjoining room which is freezing;
here other shouting people throw at us unrecognisable
rags and thrust into our hands a pair of broken-down
boots with wooden soles; we have no time to understand
and we already find ourselves in the open, in the blue
and icy snow of dawn, barefoot and naked, with all our
clothing in our hands, with a hundred yards to mn to
the next hut. There we are finally allowed to get dressed.

When we finish, everyone remains in his own corner
and we do not dare lift our eyes to look at one another.

20

On the Bottom

There is nowhere to look in a mirror, but our appearance
stands in front of us, reflected in a hundred livid
faces, in a hundred miserable and sordid puppets. We
are transformed into the phantoms glimpsed yesterday
evening.

Then for the first time we became aware that our lan¬
guage lacks words to express this offence, the demolition
of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition,
the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the
bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no
human condition is more miserable than this, nor could
it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore;
they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our
hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they
listen, they will not understand. They will even take
away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will
have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage
somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us
as we were, still remains.

We know that we will have difficulty in being
understood, and this is as it should be. But consider
what value, what meaning is enclosed even in the smallest
of our daily habits, in the hundred possessions which even
the poorest beggar owns: a handkerchief, an old letter,
the photo of a cherished person. These things are part
of us, almost like limbs of our body; nor is it conceivable
that we can be deprived of them in our world, for we
immediately find others to substitute the old ones, other
objects which are ours in their personification and evoca¬
tion of our memories.

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone
he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits,
his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he
will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs,
forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all

21

If This is a Man

often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose
life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of
human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the
basis of a pure judgement of utility. It is in this way
that one can understand the double sense of the term
“extermination camp,” and it is now clear what we
seek to express with the phrase: “to lie on the bottom.”

Haftling 1 : I have learnt that I am a Haftling. My
number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will
carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

The operation was slightly painful and extraordinarily
rapid: they placed us all in a row, and one by one,
according to the alphabetical order of our names, we
filed past a skilful official, armed with a sort of pointed
tool with a very short needle. It seems that this is
the real, true initiation: only by “showing one’s number”
can one get bread and soup. Several days passed, and
not a few cuffs and punches, before we became used
to showing our number promptly enough not to disorder
the daily operation of food-distribution; weeks and
months were needed to learn its sound in the German
language. And for many days, while the habits of
freedom still led me to look for the time on my
wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead,
its number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

Only much later, and slowly, a few of us learnt
something of the funereal science of the numbers of
Auschwitz, which epitomize the stages of destruction
of European Judaism. To the old hands of the camp,
the numbers told everything: the period of entry into
the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and
consequently the nationality. Everyone will treat with

1 A prisoner.

22

On the Bottom

respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are
only a few hundred left and they represent the few
survivals from the Polish ghettos. It is as well to watch
out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or a 117,000:
they now number only about forty, but they represent
the Greeks of Salonica, so take care they do not pull
the wool over your eyes. As for the high numbers,
they carry an essentially comic air about them, like the
words “ freshman ” or “ conscript ” in ordinary life. The
typical high number is a corpulent, docile and stupid
fellow: he can be convinced that leather shoes are
distributed at the infirmary to all those with delicate
feet, and can be persuaded to run there and leave his
bowl of soup “in your custody”; you can sell him a
spoon for three rations of bread; you can send him to
the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (as happened
to me!) if it is true that his is the Kartoffelschalen-
kommando, the “Potato Peeling Command,” and if one
can be enrolled in it.

In fact, the whole process of introduction to what
was for us a new order took place in a grotesque
and sarcastic manner. When the tattooing operation
was finished, they shut us in a vacant hut. The bunks
are made, but we are severely forbidden to touch or sit
on them: so we wander around aimlessly for half the
day in the limited space available, still tormented by the
parching thirst of the journey. Then the door opens
and a boy in a striped suit comes in, with a fairly
civilized air, small, thin and blond. He speaks French
and we throng around him with a flood of questions
which till now we had asked each other in vain.

But he does not speak willingly; no one here speaks
willingly. We are new, we have nothing and we know
nothing; why waste time on us? He reluctantly explains

23

If This is a Man

to us that all the others are out at work and will come
back in the evening. He has come out of the infirmary
this morning and is exempt from work for today. I asked
him (with an ingenuousness that only a few days later
already seemed incredible to me) if at least they would
give us back our toothbrushes. He did not laugh, but with
his face animated by fierce contempt, he threw at me
“Vous n’etes pas a la maison .” And it is this refrain
that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at
home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way
of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were
all to learn what it meant.)

And it was in fact so. Driven by thirst, I eyed a
fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I
opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once
a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched
it away from me. “IF arum?" I asked him in my poor
German. “Hier ist kein uartmf (there is no why here),
he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.

The explanation is repugnant but simple: in this
place everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons,
but because the camp has been created for that purpose.
If one wants to live one must learn this quickly and
well:

“No Sacred Face will help thee here! it’s not
A Serchio bathing-party....”

Hour after hour, this first long day of limbo draws
to its end. While the sun sets in a tumult of fierce,
blood-red clouds, they finally make us come out of the
hut. Will they give us something to drink? No, they
place us in line again, they lead us to a huge square
which takes up the centre of the camp and they arrange
us meticulously in squads. Then nothing happens

24

On the Bottom

for another hour: it seems that we are waiting for
someone.

A band begins to play, next to the entrance of the
camp: it plays Rosatnunda, the well known sentimental
song, and this seems so strange to us that we look
sniggering at each other; we feel a shadow of relief,
perhaps all these ceremonies are nothing but a colossal
farce in Teutonic taste. But the band, on finishing
Rosamunda, continues to play other marches, one after
the other, and suddenly the squads of our comrades
appear, returning from work. They walk in columns
of five with a strange, unnatural hard gait, like
stiff puppets made of jointless bones; but they walk
scrupulously in time to the band.

They also arrange themselves like us in the huge
square, according to a precise order; when the last squad
has returned, they count and recount us for over an
hour. Long checks are made which all seem to go to
a man dressed in stripes, who accounts for them to a
group of SS men in full battle dress.

Finally (it is dark by now, but the camp is brightly
lit by headlamps and reflectors) one hears the shout
“ Ahsperre /” at which all the squads break up in a
confused and turbulent movement. They no longer
walk stiffly and erectly as before: each one drags himself
along with obvious effort. I see that all of them carry
in their hand or attached to their belt a steel bowl as
large as a basin.

We new arrivals also wander among the crowd,
searching for a voice, a friendly face or a guide. Against
the wooden wall of a hut two boys are seated on the
ground: they seem very young, sixteen years old at the
outside, both with their face and hands dirty with soot.
One of the two, as we are passing by, calls me and asks
me in German some questions which I do not understand;

25

If This is a Man

then he asks where we come from. “ Italien I reply;
I want to ask him many things, but my German vocabulary
is very limited.

“Are you a Jew?” I ask him.

“Yes, a Polish Jew.”

“How long have you been in the Lager?”

“Three years,” and he lifts up three fingers. He must
have been a child when he entered, I think with horror;
on the other hand this means that at least some manage
to live here.

“What is your work?”

“ Schlosser ,” he replies. I do not understand. “ Eisen ,
Feuer” (iron, fire), he insists, and makes a play with
his hands of someone beating with a hammer on an
anvil. So he is an ironsmith.

“Ich Chemiker f I state; and he nods earnestly with
his head, “Chemiker gut." But all this has to do with
the distant future: what torments me at the moment
is my thirst.

“Drink, water. We no water,” I tell him.

He looks at me with a serious face, almost severe,
and states clearly: “Do not drink water, comrade,” and
then other words that I do not understand.

“Warum A

“ Geschwollen ,” he replies cryptically. I shake my
head, I have not understood. “ Swollen he makes me
understand, blowing out his cheeks and sketching with
his hands a monstruous tumefaction of the face and
belly. “Warten his heute Abend." “Wait until this
evening,” I translate word by word.

Then he says: “Ich Schlome. Du?" I tell him my
name, and he asks me: “Where your mother?”

“In Italy.” Schlome is amazed: a Jew in Italy?
“Yes,” I explain as best I can, “hidden, no one knows,
run away, does not speak, no one sees her.” He has

26

On the Bottom

understood; he now gets up, approaches me and timidly
embraces me. The adventure is over, and I feel filled
with a serene sadness that is almost joy. I have never
seen Schlome since, but I have not forgotten his serious
and gentle face of a child, which welcomed me on the
threshold of the house of the dead.

We still have a great number of things to learn,
but we have learnt many already. We already have a
certain idea of the topography of the Lager; our Lager
is a square of about six hundred yards in length,
surrounded by two fences of barbed wire, the inner one
carrying a high tension current. It consists of sixty
wooden huts, which are called Blocks, ten of which
are in construction. In addition, there is the body of
the kitchens, which are in brick; an experimental farm,
run by a detachment of privileged Haftlinge; the huts
with the showers and the latrines, one for each group
of six or eight Blocks. Besides these, certain Blocks
are reserved for specific purposes. First of all, a group of
eight, at the extreme eastern end of the camp, forms
the infirmary and clinic; then there is Block 24 which
is the Kratzeblock, reserved for infectious skin-diseases;
Block 7 which no ordinary Haftling has ever entered,
reserved for the “ Prominenz that is, the aristocracy, the
internees holding the highest posts; Block 47, reserved
for the Reichsdeutsche (the Aryan Germans, ‘politicals’
or criminals); Block 49, for the Kapos alone; Block 12,
half of which, for use of the Reichsdeutsche and the
Kapos, serves as canteen, that is, a distribution centre for
tobacco, insect powder and occasionally other articles;
Block 37, which formed the Quartermaster’s office and
the Office for Work; and finally, Block 29, which always
has its windows closed as it is the Frauenblock, the

27

If This is a Man

camp brothel, served by Polish Haftling girls, and
reserved for the Reichsdeutsche.

The ordinary living Blocks are divided into two
parts. In one Tagesraum lives the head of the hut
with his friends. There is a long table, seats, benches,
and on all sides a heap of strange objects in bright
colours, photographs, cuttings from magazines, sketches,
imitation flowers, ornaments; on the walls, great sayings,
proverbs and rhymes in praise of order, discipline and
hygiene; in one corner, a shelf with the tools of the
Blockfrisor (official barber), the ladles to distribute the
soup, and two rubber truncheons, one solid and one
hollow, to enforce discipline should the proverbs prove
insufficient. The other part is the dormitory: there
are only one hundred and forty-eight bunks on three
levels, fitted close to each other like the cells of a
beehive, and divided by three corridors so as to utilize
without wastage all the space in the room up to the
roof. Here all the ordinary Haftlinge live, about two
hundred to two hundred and fifty per hut. Consequently
there are two men in most of the bunks, which are
portable planks of wood, each covered by a thin straw
sack and two blankets.

The corridors are so narrow that two people can
barely pass together; the total area of the floor is so
small that the inhabitants of the same Block cannot all
stay there at the same time unless at least half are
lying on their bunks. Hence the prohibition to enter
a Block to which one does not belong.

In the middle of the Lager is the roll-call square,
enormous, where we collect in the morning to form
the work-squads and in the evening to be counted.
Facing the roll-call square there is a bed of grass,
carefully mown, where the gallows are erected when
necessary.

28

On the Bottom

We had soon learned that the guests of the Lager
are divided into three categories: the criminals, the
politicals and the Jews. All are clothed in stripes, all
are Haftlinge, but the criminals wear a green triangle
next to the number sewn on the jacket; the politicals
wear a red triangle; and the Jews, who form the large
majority, wear the Jewish star, red and yellow. SS men
exist but are few and outside the camp, and are seen
relatively infrequently. Our effective masters in practice
are the green triangles, who have a free hand over us,
as well as those of the other two categories who are
ready to help them — and they are not few.

And we have learnt other things, more or less
quickly, according to our intelligence: to reply “ Ja-wohl ,”
never to ask questions, always to pretend to understand.
We have learnt the value of food; now we also
diligently scrape the bottom of the bowl after the ration
and we hold it under our chins when we eat bread so
as not to lose the crumbs. We, too, know that it is not
the same thing to be given a ladleful of soup from the
top or from the bottom of the vat, and we are already
able to judge, according to the capacity of the various
vats, what is the most suitable place to try and reach
in the queue when we line up.

We have learnt that everything is useful: the wire
to tie up our shoes, the rags to wrap around our feet,
waste paper to (illegally) pad out our jacket against
the cold. We have learnt, on the other hand, that
everything can be stolen, in fact is automatically stolen
as soon as attention is relaxed; and to avoid this, we
had to learn the art of sleeping with our head on a
bundle made up of our jacket and containing all our
belongings, from the bowl to the shoes.

We already know in good part the rules of the
camp, which are incredibly complicated. The prohibitions

29

If This is a Man

are innumerable: to approach nearer to the barbed wire
than two yards; to sleep with one’s jacket, or without
one's pants, or with one’s cap on one’s head; to use
certain washrooms or latrines which are “nur fur Kapos”
or “war fur Reichsdeutscbe '; not to go for the shower
on the prescribed day, or to go there on a day not
prescribed; to leave the hut with one’s jacket unbuttoned,
or with the collar raised; to carry paper or straw under
one’s clothes against the cold; to wash except stripped
to the waist.

The rites to be carried out were infinite and senseless:
every morning one had to make the “bed” perfectly
flat and smooth; smear one’s muddy and repellent wooden
shoes with the appropriate machine grease; scrape the
mudstains off one’s clothes (paint, grease and rust-stains
were, however, permitted); in the evening one had to
undergo the control for lice and the control of washing
one’s feet; on Saturday, have one’s beard and hair
shaved, mend or have mended one’s rags; on Sunday,
undergo the general control for skin diseases and the
control of buttons on one’s jacket, which had to be five.

In addition, there are innumerable circumstances,
normally irrelevant, which here become problems. When
one’s nails grow long, they have to be shortened, which
can only be done with one’s teeth (for the toenails, the
friction of the shoes is sufficient); if a button comes
off, one has to tie it on with a piece of wire; if one
goes to the latrine or the washroom, everything has to
be carried along, always and everywhere, and while one
washes one’s face, the bundle of clothes has to be held
tightly between one’s knees: in any other manner it
will be stolen in that second. If a shoe hurts, one has
to go in the evening to the ceremony of the changing
of the shoes: this tests the skill of the individual who,
in the middle of the incredible crowd, has to be able

30

On the Bottom

to choose at an eye’s glance one (not a pair, one) shoe,
which fits. Because once the choice is made, there can
be no second change.

And do not think that shoes form a factor of
secondary importance in the life of the Lager. Death
begins with the shoes; for most of us, they show
themselves to be instruments of torture, which after a
few hours of marching cause painful sores which become
fatally infected. Whoever has them is forced to walk
as if he was dragging a convict’s chain (this explains
the strange gait of the army which returns every evening
on parade); he arrives last everywhere, and everywhere
he receives blows. He cannot escape if they run after
him; his feet swell and the more they swell, the more
the friction with the wood and the cloth of the shoes
becomes insupportable. Then only the hospital is left:
but to enter the hospital with a diagnosis of “dicke
Fiisse" (swollen feet) is extremely dangerous, because
it is well known to all, and especially to the SS, that
here there is no cure for that complaint.

And in all this we have not yet mentioned the work,
which in its turn is a Gordian knot of laws, taboos and
problems.

We all work, except those who are ill (to be
recognized as ill implies in itself an important equipment
of knowledge and experience). Every' morning we leave
the camp in squads for the Buna; every evening, in
squads, we return. As regards the work, we are divided
into about two hundred Kommandos, each of which
consists of between fifteen and one hundred and fifty
men and is commanded by a Kapo. There are good and
bad Kommandos; for the most part they are used as
transport and the work is quite hard, especially in the
winter, if for no other reason merely because it always
takes place in the open. There are also skilled

31

If This is a Man

Kommandos (electricians, smiths, brick-layers, welders,
mechanics, concrete-layers, etc.), each attached to a
certain workshop or department of the Buna, and
depending more directly on civilian foremen, mostly
German and Polish. This naturally only applied to
the hours of work; for the rest of the day the skilled
workers (there are no more than three or four hundred
in all) receive no different treatment from the ordinary
workers. The detailing of individuals to the various
Kommandos is organized by a special office of the Lager,
the Arbeitsdienst , which is in continual touch with the
civilian direction of the Buna. The Arbeitsdienst decided
on the basis of unknown criteria, often openly on the
basis of protection or corruption, so that if anyone
manages to find enough to eat, he is practically certain
to get a good post at Buna.

The hours of work vary with the season. All hours
of light are working hours: so that from a minimum
winter working day (8-12 a. m. and 12.30-4 p.m.) one
rises to a maximum summer one (6.30-12 a.m. and 1-6
p.m.). Under no excuse are the Haftlinge allowed to be
at work during the hours of darkness or when there
is a thick fog, but they work regularly even if it rains
or snows or (as occurs quite frequently) if the fierce
wind of the Carpathians blows; the reason being that the
darkness or fog might provide opportunities to escape.

One Sunday in every two is a regular working day;
on the so-called holiday Sundays, instead of working at
Buna, one works normally on the upkeep of the Lager,
so that days of real rest are extremely rare.

Such will be our life. Every day, according to the
established rhythm, Ausriicken and Eimiicken, go out
and come in; work, sleep and eat; fall ill, get better
or die.

32

On the Bottom

... And for how long? But the old ones laugh at
this question: they recognize the new arrivals by this
question. They laugh and they do not reply. For
months and years, the problem of the remote future
has grown pale to them and has lost all intensity in
face of the far more urgent and concrete problems of the
near future: how much one will eat today, if it will
snow, if there will be coal to unload.

If we were logical, we would resign ourselves to the
evidence that our fate is beyond human knowledge, that
every conjecture is arbitrary and demonstrably devoid
of foundation. But men are rarely logical when their
own fate is at stake; on every occasion, they prefer the
extreme positions. According to our character, some of
us are immediately convinced that all is lost, that one
cannot live here, that the end is near and sure; others
are convinced that however hard the present life may
be, salvation is probable and not far off, and if we have
faith and strength, we will see our houses and our dear
ones again. The two classes of pessimists and optimists
are not so clearly defined, however, not because there
are many agnostics, but because the majority, without
memory or coherence, drift between the two extremes,
according to the moment and the mood of the person
they happen to meet.

Here I am, then, on the bottom. One learns quickly
enough to wipe out the past and the future when one
is forced to. A fortnight after my arrival I already
had the prescribed hunger, that chronic hunger unknown
to free men, which makes one dream at night, and
settles in all the limbs of one’s body. I have already
learnt not to let myself be robbed, and in fact if I find
a spoon lying around, a piece of string, a button which
I can acquire without danger of punishment, I pocket
them and consider them mine by full right. On the

33

If This is a Man

back of my feet I already have those numb sores that
will not heal. I push wagons, I work with a shovel,
I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind; already
my own body is no longer mine: my belly is swollen, my
limbs emaciated, my face is thick in the morning, hollow
in the evening; some of us have yellow skin, others
grey. When we do not meet for a few days we hardly
recognize each other.

We Italians had decided to meet every Sunday evening
in a corner of the Lager, but we stopped it at once,
because it was too sad to count our numbers and find
fewer each time, and to see each other ever more
deformed and more squalid. And it was so tiring to
walk those few steps and then, meeting each other, to
remember and to think. It was better not to think.

34

Initiation

After the first day of capricious transfer from hut
to hut and from Kommando to Kommando, I am assigned
to Block 30 late one evening, and shown a bunk in
which Diena is already sleeping. Diena wakes up, and
although exhausted, makes room for me and receives
me hospitably.

I am not sleepy, or more accurately, my sleepiness is
masked by a state of tension and anxiety of which I
have not yet managed to rid myself, and so I talk
and talk.

I have too many things to ask. 1 am hungry and
when will they distribute the soup tomorrow? And will
I be able to eat it without a spoon? And where will I
be able to find one? And where will they send me to
work? Diena knows no more than I, and replies with
other questions. But from above and below, from near
by and from far away, from all corners of the now dark
hut, sleepy and angry voices shout at me: “Ruhe, Ruhel”

I understand that they are ordering me to be quiet,
but the word is new to me, and since I do not know

35

If This is a Man

its meaning and implications, my inquietude increases.
The confusion of languages is a fundamental component
of the manner of living here: one is surrounded by a
perpetual Babel, in which everyone shouts orders and
threats in languages never heard before, and woe betide
whoever fails to grasp the meaning. No one has time
here, no one has patience, no one listens to you; we
latest arrivals instinctively collect in the corners, against
the walls, afraid of being beaten.

So I give up asking questions and soon slip into
a bitter and tense sleep. But it is not rest: I feel
myself threatened, besieged, at every moment I am ready
to draw myself into a spasm of defence. I dream and
I seem to sleep on a road, on a bridge, across a door
through which many people are passing. And now,
oh, so early, the reveille sounds. The entire hut shakes
to its foundations, the lights are put on, everyone near
me bustles around in a sudden frantic activity. They
shake the blankets raising clouds of fetid dust, they dress
with feverish hurry, they run outside into the freezing
air half-dressed, they rush headlong towards the latrines
and washrooms. Some, bestially, urinate while they
run to save time, because within five minutes begins
the distribution of bread, of bread-Brot-Broid-chleb-pain-
lechem-kenyer, of the holy grey slab which seems
gigantic in your neighbour’s hand, and in your own
hand so small as to make you cry. It is a daily
hallucination to which in the end one becomes accus¬
tomed : but at the beginning it is so irresistible that many
of us, after long discussions on our own open and
constant misfortune and the shameless luck of others,
finally exchange our ration, at which the illusion is
renewed inverted, leaving everyone discontented and
frustrated.

Bread is also our only money: in the few minutes

36

Initiation

which elapse between its distribution and consumption,
the Block resounds with claims, quarrels and scuffles.
It is the creditors of yesterday who are claiming payment
in the brief moment in which the debtor is solvent.
After which a relative quiet begins and many take
advantage to go to the latrines again to smoke half
a cigarette, or to the washrooms to wash themselves
properly.

The washroom is far from attractive. It is badly
lighted, full of draughts, with the brick floor covered
by a layer of mud. The water is not drinkable; it has
a revolting smell and often fails for many hours. The
walls are covered by curious didactic frescoes: for
example, there is the good Haftling, portrayed stripped
to the waist, about to diligently soap his sheared and
rosy cranium, and the bad Haftling, with a strong
Semitic nose and a greenish colour, bundled up in his
ostentatiously stained clothes with a beret on his head,
who cautiously dips a finger into the water of the
washbasin. Under the first is written: “So bist du
rein ” (like this you are clean), and under the second:
“So gehst du ein" (like this you come to a bad end);
and lower down, in doubtful French but in Gothic
script: “La proprete, c'est la sante."

On the opposite wall an enormous white, red and
black louse encamps, with the writing: “Line Laus, dein
Tod ” (a louse is your death), and the inspired distich:

“Nach dem Abort, vor dem Essen

Hande waschen, nicht vergessen .”

(After the latrine, before eating, wash your hands, do not
forget.)

For many weeks I considered these warnings about
hygiene as pure examples of the Teutonic sense of

37

If This is a Man

humour, in the style of the dialogue about the truss
which we had heard on our entry into the Lager. But
later I understood that their unknown authors, perhaps
without realising it, were not far from some very
important truths. In this place it is practically pointless
to wash every day in the turbid water of the filthy
washbasins for purposes of cleanliness and health; but
it is most important as a symptom of remaining vitality,
and necessary as an instrument of moral survival.

I must confess it: after only one week of prison,
the instinct for cleanliness disappeared in me. I wander
aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see
Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso,
scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he
has no soap) but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and
greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why
I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better
off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would
I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a
shorter time, because to wash is an effort, a waste of
energy and warmth. Does not Steinlauf know that
after half an hour with the coal sacks every difference
between him and me will have disappeared? The more
I think about it, the more washing one’s face in
our condition seems a stupid feat, even frivolous: a
mechanical habit, or worse, a dismal repetition of an
extinct rite. We will all die, we are all about to die:
if they give me ten minutes between the reveille and
work, I want to dedicate them to something else, to
draw into myself, to weigh up things, or merely to
look at the sky and think that I am looking at it
perhaps for the last time; or even to let myself live,
to indulge myself in the luxury of an idle moment.

But Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing
and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket which

38

Imitiation

he was holding before wrapped up between his knees
and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting
the operation he administers me a complete lesson.

It grieves me now that I have forgotten his plain,
outspoken words, the words of ex-sergeant Steinlauf
of the Austro-Hungarian army, Iron Cross of the ’14-’18
war. It grieves me because it means that I have to
translate his uncertain Italian and his quiet manner
of speaking of a good soldier into my language of an
incredulous man. But this was the sense, not forgotten
either then or later: that precisely because the Lager
was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must
not become beasts; that even in this place one can
survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell
the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must
force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the
scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves,
deprived of every right, exposed to every insult,
condemned to certain death, but we still possess one
power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it
is the last — the power to refuse our consent. So we
must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty
water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish
our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for
dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without
dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline
but to remain alive, not to begin to die.

These things Steinlauf, a man of good will, told
me; strange things to my unaccustomed ear, understood
and accepted only in part, and softened by an easier,
more flexible and blander doctrine, which for centuries
has found its dwelling place on the other side of the
Alps; according to which, among other things, nothing
is of greater vanity than to force oneself to swallow
whole a moral system elaborated by others, under another

39

If This is a Man

sky. No, the wisdom and virtue of Steinlauf, certainly
good for him, is not enough for me. In the face of
this complicated world my ideas of damnation are
confused; is it really necessary to elaborate a system
and put it into practice? Or would it not be better to
acknowledge one’s lack of a system?

40

Ka-Be

The days all seem alike and it is not easy to count
them. For days now we have formed teams of two,
from the railway to the store — a hundred yards over
thawing ground. To the store, bending underneath
the load, back again, arms hanging down one’s sides,
not speaking.

Around us, exerything is hostile. Above us the
malevolent clouds chase each other to separate us from
the sun; on all sides the squalor of the toiling steel
closes in on us. We have never seen its boundaries,
but we feel all around us the evil presence of the
barbed wire that separates us from the world. And on
the scaffolding, on the trains being switched about, on
the roads, in the pits, in the offices, men and more men,
slaves and masters, the masters slaves themselves. Fear
motivates the former, hatred the latter, all other forces
are silent. All are enemies or rivals.

No, I honestly do not feel my companion of today,
harnessed with me under the same load, to be either
enemy or rival.

41

If This is a Matt

He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything
except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of
his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only
man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no
longer a man. I think that even he has forgotten his
name, certainly he acts as if this was so. When he
speaks, when he looks around, he gives the impression
of being empty inside, nothing more than an involucre,
like the slough of certain insects which one finds on
the banks of swamps, held by a thread to the stones
and shaken by the wind.

Null Achtzehn is very young, which is a grave
danger. Not only because boys support exhaustion and
fasting worse than adults, but even more because a
long training is needed to survive here in the struggle
of each one against all, a training which young people
rarely have. Null Achtzehn is not even particularly
weak, but all avoid working with him. He is indifferent
to the point of not even troubling to avoid tiredness
and blows or to search for food. He carries out all
the orders that he is given, and it is foreseeable that
when they send him to his death he will go with the
same total indifference.

He has not even the rudimentary astuteness of a
draughthorse, which stops pulling a little before it
reaches exhaustion: he pulls or carries or pushes as
long as his strength allows him, then he gives way at
once, without a word of warning, without lifting his
sad, opaque eyes from the ground. He made me think
of the sledge-dogs in London’s books, who slave until
the last breath and die on the track.

But as all the rest of us try by every possible means
to avoid work, Null Achtzehn is the one who works
more than all. It is because of this, and because he is
a dangerous companion, that no one wants to work

42

Ka-Be

with him; and as, on the other hand, no one wants to
work with me, because I am weak and clumsy, it often
happens that we find ourselves paired together.

As we come back once again from the store, with
hands empty, dragging our feet, an engine whistles
briefly and cuts off our path. Happy at the enforced
delay, Null Achtzehn and I stop; bent and in rags,
we wait for the wagons to pass slowly by.

...Deutsche Reichsbahn. Deutsche Reichsbahn. SNCF.
Two huge Russian goods wagons with the hammer and
sickle badly rubbed off. Then, Cavalli 8, Uomini 70,
Tara, Portata: an Italian wagon.... Oh, to climb into
a corner, well-hidden under the coal, and to stay there
quiet and still in the dark, to listen endlessly to the
rhythm of the wheels, stronger than hunger or tiredness;
until, at a certain moment, the train would stop and I
would feel the warm air and the smell of hay and
I would get out into the sun; then I would lie down
on the ground to kiss the earth, as you read in books,
with my face in the grass. And a woman would pass,
and she would ask me “Who are you?” in Italian, and
I would tell her my story in Italian, and she would
understand, and she would give me food and shelter.
And she would not believe the things I tell her, and I
would show her the number on my arm, and then
she would believe....

... It is over. The last wagon has passed, and as
if the curtain had been raised, the pile of cast-iron
supports lies before our eyes. The Kapo on his feet at
the pile with a switch in his hand, the wan companions
who come and go in pairs.

Alas for the dreamer: the moment of consciousness
that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of

43

If This is a Man

sufferings. But it does not often happen to us, and
they are not long dreams. We are only tired beasts.

We are once again at the foot of the pile. Mischa
and the Galician lift a support and put it roughly on
our shoulders. Their job is the least tiring, so that
they show excess zeal to keep it: they shout at
companions who dawdle, they incite them, they admonish
them, they drive on the work at an unbearable pace.
This fills me with anger, although I already know that
it is in the normal order of things that the privileged
oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the
camp is based on this human law.

This time it is my turn to walk in front. The
support is heavy but very short, so that at every step
I feel behind me Null Achtzehn’s feet which tread on
mine, as he is unable or cannot be bothered to keep
in step.

Twenty steps, we have arrived at the railroad, there
is a cable to climb over. The load is badly placed,
something is not right, it seems to be slipping from my
shoulder. Fifty steps, sixty. The door of the store:
still the same distance to walk and we can put it down.
It is enough, I cannot go any further, the load is now
weighing entirely on my arm. I cannot stand the pain
and exhaustion any longer: I shout, I try to turn around,
just in time to see Null Achtzehn trip and throw
everything down.

If I had still had my agility of earlier days I could
have jumped back: instead, here I am on the ground,
with all my muscles contracted, the wounded foot tight
between my hands, blind with pain. The corner of
the piece of iron had cut across the back of my foot.

For a moment all is blank in the giddiness of pain.
When I manage to look around, Null Achtzehn is still

44

Ka-Be

there on his feet, he has not moved, with his hands
in his sleeves, his face expressionless, he does not say
a word. Mischa and the Galician arrive, speaking
Yiddish to each other, they give me incomprehensible
advice. Templer and David and the others arrive: they
profit from the distraction to stop work. The Kapo
arrives, he distributes kicks, punches and abuse, and the
comrades disperse like chaff in the wind. Null Achtzehn
puts his hand to his nose and blankly looks at it, dirty
with blood. I only receive two blows on the head, of
the sort that do no harm but simply stun.

The incident is closed. It is proven, for good or
bad, that I can stand up, so that the bone cannot be
broken. I do not dare to cut the boot open for fear
of wakening the pain again, and also because I know
that the foot will swell and I will be unable to put the
boot on again.

The Kapo sends me to take the place of the Galician
at the pile, and the latter, glaring at me, takes his place
alongside Null Achtzehn; but by now the English
prisoners have passed, it will soon be time to return
to the camp.

During the march I do my best to walk quickly,
but I cannot keep up the pace. The Kapo picks out
Null Achtzehn and Finder to help me as far as the
procession in front of the SS, and finally (fortunately
there is no roll-call this evening) I am in the hut and I
can throw myself on the bunk and breathe.

Perhaps it is the heat, perhaps the fatigue of the
march, but the pain has begun again, together with a
strange feeling of humidity in the wounded foot. I take
off my shoe: it is full of blood, by now congealed and
kneaded into the mud and rags of the cloth I found
a month ago, and which I use as a foot-pad, one day on
the right, one day on the left foot.

45

If This is a Man

This evening, after soup, I will go to Ka-Be.

Ka-Be is the abbreviation of Krankenbau, the
infirmary. There are eight huts, exactly like the others
in the camp, but separated by a wire fence. They
permanently hold a tenth of the population of the camp,
but there are few who stay there longer than two
weeks and none more than two months: within these
limits they are held to die or be cured. Those who
show signs of improvement are cured in Ka-Be, those who
seem to get worse are sent from Ka-Be to the gas
chambers. All this because we, fortunately, belong to
the category of “economically useful Jews.’ -

I have never been to Ka-Be nor to the clinic, and it is
all new to me. There are two clinics, medical and surgical.
In front of the door, exposed to the night and the wind,
there are two long rows of shadows. Some only have
need of a bandage or a pill, others ask to be examined;
some show death in their faces. Those at the front of
both rows are already barefoot and ready to enter. Others,
as their turn to enter approaches, contrive in the middle
of the crush to loosen the haphazard laces and wire
threads of their shoes and to unfold the precious foot-pads
without losing them; not too early, so as not to stand
pointlessly in the mud in bare feet; not too late, so as
not to lose their turn to enter, because it is rigolously
forbidden to enter Ka-Be with shoes. A gigantic French
Haftling, sitting in the porch between the doors of the
two clinics, enforces respect for the prohibition. He is
one of the few French officials of the camp. And do
not think that to spend one’s day among the muddy and
broken shoes is a small privilege: it is enough to
think of how many enter Ka-Be with shoes, and leave
with no further need of them....

When my turn comes I manage miraculously to

46

Ka-Be

take off my shoes and rags without losing any of them,
without letting my bowl and gloves be stolen, without
losing my balance, and keeping my beret in my hand
all the time, as for no reason can one wear it on
entering a hut.

I leave the shoes at the deposit and am given the
appropriate check, after which, barefoot and limping,
my hands full of all my poor possessions that I dare
not leave anywhere, 1 am admitted inside and join a
new queue which ends in the examination rooms.

In this queue one progressively undresses so as to
be naked when one arrives at the head, where a male
nurse puts a thermometer under one’s arm-pit. If anyone
is dressed he loses his turn and goes back to join the
queue. Everybody has to be given the thermometer,
even if he only has a skin disease or toothche. In this
way they make sure that whoever is not seriously ill
will not submit himself to this complicated ritual for
the sake of caprice.

My turn finally arrives and I am brought in front
of the doctor. The nurse takes out the thermometer
and presents me: “ Mummer 174517, kein Fieber.'" I do
not need a long examination: I am immediately declared
Arztvortnelder. What it means I do not know, but this
is certainly not the place to ask for explanations. I find
myself thrown out, I get back my shoes and go back
to the hut.

Chajim rejoices with me: I have a good wound,
it does not seem dangerous, but it should be enough to
guarantee me a discreet period of rest. I will spend
the night in the hut with the others, but tomorrow
morning, instead of going to work, I will have to show
myself to the doctors for the definitive examination:
this is what Arztvormelder means. Chajim is experienced
in these matters and he thinks that I will probably

47

If This is a Man

be admitted tomorrow to Ka-Be. Chajim is my bed-
companion and I trust him blindly. He is Polish, a
religious Jew, learned in rabbinical law. He is about
as old as I, a watchmaker by profession, and here in
Buna works as a precision mechanic; so he is among
the few who are able to preserve their dignity and
self-assurance through the practice of a profession in
which they are skilled.

And so it happened. After the reveille and the
bread they called me out with three others from my hut.
They took us to a corner of the roll-call square where
there was a long queue, all the Arztvormelder of today;
someone came and took away my bowl, spoon, beret
and gloves. The others laughed. Did I not know that I
had to hide them or leave them with someone, or best
of all sell them, as they cannot be taken in Ka-Be?
Then they look at my number and shake their heads:
any stupidity is to be expected from one with so high
a number.

Then they counted us, they made us undress outside
in the cold, they took our shoes, they counted us again,
and they made us take a shower. Then an SS man
came, he looked at us without interest, stopping in front
of one with a large hydrocele, whom he placed apart.
After which they counted us again and made us take
another shower, although we were still wet from the
first one and some were trembling from a chill.

We are now ready for the definitive examination.
Outside the window one can see the white sky and
sometimes the sun; in this country one can look at it
fixedly, through the clouds, as through a misty window.
To judge by its position it must be past 2 p.m. Good-bye
soup by now, and we have been on our feet for ten
hours and naked for six.

This second medical examination is also extraordi-

48

Ka-Be

narily rapid: the doctor (he has a striped suit like us,
but with a white coat over it, with the number sewn
on the coat, and he is much fatter than us) looks at
and touches my swollen and bloody foot, at which I cry
out from pain. Then he says: “ Aufgenommen, Block 23.”
I stand there with my mouth open, waiting for some
other indication, but someone pulls me backwards
brutally, throws a gown on my bare shoulders, gives me
a pair of sandals, and drives me out into the open.

A hundred yards away is Block 23; written on it is
“ Schonungsblock .” Who knows what it means? Inside
they take off my gown and sandals and I find myself
naked and last again in a queue of human skeletons —
the inmates of today.

I have stopped trying to understand for a long time
now. As far as I am concerned, I am by now so tired
of standing on my wounded foot, still untended, so
hungry and frozen, that nothing can interest me any more.
This might easily be my last day and this room the
gaschamber of which all speak, but what can I do
about it? I might just as well lean against the wall,
close my eyes and wait.

My neighbour cannot be Jewish. He is not
circumcised and besides (this is one of the few things
that I have so far learnt), so blond a skin, a face and
a body so huge, are characteristics of non-Jewish Poles.
He is a whole head taller than me but he has quite
cordial features, as have only those who do not suffer
from hunger.

I tried to ask him if he knew when they would let
us enter. He turned to the nurse who resembled him
like a twin and was smoking in the corner; they talked
and laughed together without replying, as if I was not
there. Then one of them took my arm and looked
at my number and then both laughed still more strongly.

49

If This is a Man

Everyone knows that the 174000s are the Italian Jews,
the well-known Italian Jews who arrived two months
ago, all lawyers, all with degrees, who were more than
a hundred and are now only forty; the ones who do
not know how to work, and let their bread be stolen,
and are slapped from the morning to the evening. The
Germans call them “zwei linke Hande ” (two left hands),
and even the Polish Jews despise them as they do not
speak Yiddish.

The nurse points to my ribs to show the other, as
if I was a corpse in an anatomy class: he alludes to my
eyelids and my swollen cheeks and my thin neck, he
stoops to press on my tibia with his thumb, and shows
the other the deep impression that his finger leaves in
the pale flesh, as if it was wax.

I wish I had never spoken to the Pole: I feel as
if I had never in all my life undergone an affront worse
than this. The nurse, meanwhile, seems to have finished
his demonstration in this language which I do not
understand and which sounds terrible. He turns to me,
and in near-German, charitably, tells me the conclusion:
“Du Jude, kaputt. Du schnell Krematorium fertig.”
(You Jew, finished. You soon ready for crematorium.)

Some more hours pass before all the inmates are
seen, are given a shirt and their details taken. I, as
usual, am the last. Someone in a brand-new striped
suit asks me where I was born, what profession I
practised “as a civilian,” if I had children, what diseases
I had had, a whole series of questions. What use could
they be? Is this a complicated rehearsal to make fools
of us? Could this be the hospital? They make us stand
naked and ask us questions.

Finally the door is opened, even for me, and I can
enter the dormitory.

50

Ka-Be

Here as everywhere there are bunks on three levels,
in three rows throughout the hut, separated by two
narrow corridors. The bunks are 150, the patients 250;
so there are two in almost all the bunks. The patients
in the upper bunks, squashed against the ceiling, can
hardly sit up; they lean out, curious to see the new
arrivals of today. It is the most interesting moment of
the day, for one always finds some acquaintances. I am
assigned bunk number 10 — a miracle! It is empty!
I stretch myself out with delight; is is the first time
since I entered the camp that I have a bunk all to
myself. Despite my hunger, within ten minutes I am
asleep.

The life of Ka-Be is a life of limbo. The material
discomforts are relatively few, apart from hunger and
the inherent pains of illness. It is not cold, there is
no work to do, and unless you commit some grave
fault, you are not beaten.

The reveille is at 4 a.m., even for the patients. One
has to make one’s bed and wash, but there is not much
hurry and little severity. The bread is distributed at
half past five, and one can cut it comfortably into
thin slices and eat it lying down in complete peace; then
one can fall asleep again until the soup is distributed at
midday. Until about 4 p.m. it is Mittagsruhe, afternoon
rest-time; then there is often the medical visit and
dispensing of medicines, and one has to climb down from
the bunks, take off one’s shirt and file past the doctor.
The evening ration is also served in bed, after which,
at 9 p.m., all the lights are turned off except for the
shaded lamp of the nightguard, and there is silence.

... And for the first time since I entered the camp
the reveille catches me in a deep sleep and its ringing

51

If This is a Man

is a return from nothingness. As the bread is distributed
one can hear, far from the windows, in the dark air,
the band beginning to play: the healthy comrades are
leaving in squads for work.

One cannot hear the music well from Ka-Be. The
beating of the big drums and the cymbals reach us
continuously and monotonously, but on this weft the
musical phrases weave a pattern only intermittently,
according to the caprices of the wind. We all look
at each other from our beds, because we all feel that
this music is infernal.

The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every
day, morning and evening: marches and popular songs
dear to every German. They lie engraven on our minds
and will be the last thing in Lager that we shall forget:
they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression
of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others
to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more
slowly afterwards.

When this music plays we know that our comrades,
out in the fog, are marching like automatons; their
souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind
drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills.
There is no longer any will: every beat of the drum
becomes a step, a reflected contraction of exhausted
muscles. The Germans have succeeded in this. They
are ten thousand and they are a single grey machine;
they are exactly determined; they do not think and they
do not desire, they walk.

At the departure and the return march the SS are
never lacking. Who could deny them their right to
watch this coreography of their creation, the dance
of dead men, squad after squad, leaving the fog to
enter the fog? What more concrete proof of their
victory?

52

Ka-Be

Even those in Ka-Be recognize this departure and
return from work, the hypnosis of the interminable
rhythm, which kills thought and deadens pain; they
have experienced it themselves and they will experience
it again. But one had to escape from the enchantment,
to hear the music from outside, as happened in Ka-Be,
and as we think back now after the liberation and the
rebirth, without obeying it, without enduring it, to
understand what it was, for what meditated reason the
Germans created this monstruous rite, and why even
today, when we happen to remember some of those
innocent songs, our blood freezes in our veins and we
become aware that to escape from Auschwitz was no
small fortune.

I have two neighbours in the adjoining bunk. They
lie down all day and all night, side by side, skin against
skin, crossed like the Pisces of the zodiac, so that each
has the feet of the other beside his head.

One is Walter Bonn, a Dutchman, civilized and
quite well mannered. He sees that I have nothing with
which to cut my bread and loans me his knife, and then
offers to sell it to me for half a ration of bread. I discuss
the price and then turn it down, as I think that I will
always find someone to lend me one here in Ka-Be,
while outside it only costs a third of a ration. Walter
is by no means less courteous because of this, and at
midday, after eating his soup, he cleans his spoon with
his mouth (which is a good rule before loaning it, so
as to clean it and not to leave waste any traces of soup
which may still be there) and spontaneously offers me it.

“What are you suffering from, Walter?”

“ Korperschtvache organic decay. The worst disease:
it cannot be cured, and it is very dangerous to enter
Ka-Be with such a diagnosis. If it had not been for

53

If This is a Man

the oedema of his ankles (and he shows me it) which
hinders him from marching to work, he would have
been very cautious about reporting ill.

I still have quite confused ideas about this kind of
danger. Everybody speaks about it indirectly, by
allusions, and when I ask some question they look at
me and fall silent.

Is it true what one hears of selections, of gas, of
crematoriums?

Crematoriums. The other one, Walter’s neighbour,
wakes up startled and sits up: who is talking about
the crematorium? what is happening? cannot a sleeping
person be left in peace? He is a Polish Jew, albino, with
an emaciated and goodnatured face, no longer young.
His name is Schmulek, he is a smith. Walter tells
him briefly.

So, “der Italeyner ” does not believe in selections.
Schmulek wants to speak German but speaks Yiddish;
I understand him with difficulty, only because he wants
to be understood. He silences Walter with a sign, he
will see about persuading me:

“Show me your number: you are 174517. This
numbering began eighteen months ago and applies to
Auschwitz and the dependent camps. There are now
ten thousand of us here at Buna-Monowitz; perhaps
thirty thousand between Auschwitz and Birkenau. Wo
sind die Andere ? Where are the others?”

“Perhaps transferred to other camps?” I suggest.

Schmulek shakes his head, he turns to Walter.

“Er will nix verst ay enf he does not want to under¬
stand.

But destiny ordained that I was soon to understand,
and at the expense of Schmulek himself. That evening
the door of the hut opened, a voice shouted “ Achtung!”

54

Ka-Be

and every sound died out to give way to a leaden
silence.

Two SS men enter (one of them has many chevrons,
perhaps he is an officer?). One can hear their steps in
the hut as if it was empty; they speak to the chief
doctor, and he shows them a register, pointing here
and there. The officer notes down in a book. Schmulek
touches my knee:

“ Pass’ auf, pass’ auf," keep your eyes open.

The officer, followed by the doctor, walks around in
silence, nonchalantly, between the bunks; he has a switch
in his hand, and flicks at the edge of a blanket hanging
down from a top bunk, the patient hurries to adjust it.

One has a yellow face; the officer pulls away his
blankets, he starts back, the officer touches his belly,
says, “Gut, gut," and moves on.

Now he is looking at Schmulek; he brings out the
book, checks the number of the bed and the number
of the tattoo. I see it all clearly from above: he has
drawn a cross beside Schmulek’s number. Then he
moves on.

I now look at Schmulek and behind him I see
Walter’s eyes, so I ask no questions.

The day after, in place of the usual group of patients
who have recovered, two distinct groups are led out.
The first have been shaved and sheared and have had
a shower. The second left as they are, with long hair
and without being treated, without a shower. Nobody
said goodbye to the latter, nobody gave them messages
for healthy comrades.

Schmulek formed part of this group.

In this discreet and composed manner, without display
or anger, massacre moves through the huts of Ka-Be
every day, touching here and there. When Schmulek
left, he gave me his spoon and knife; Walter and I

55

If This is a Man

avoided looking at each other and remained silent for a
long time. Then Walter asked me how I manage to
keep my ration of bread so long, and explained to me
that he usually cuts his bread lengthwise to have longer
slices in order to smear on the margarine more easily.

Walter explains many things to me: Schonungsblock
means the rest hut, where there are only the less serious
patients or convalescents, or those not requiring attention.
Among them, at least fifty more or less serious dysentery
patients.

These are checked every third day. They are placed
in a line along the corridor. At the end there are two
tin-plate pots, and the nurse with a register, watch and
pencil. Two at a time, the patients present themselves
and have to show, on the spot and at once, that they
still have diarrhoea; to prove it, they are given exactly
one minute. After which, they show the result to the
nurse who looks at it and judges. They wash the pots
quickly in a wash-tub near-by and the next two take over.

Of those waiting, some are contorted in the pain of
keeping in their precious evidence another ten, another
twenty minutes; others, without resources at the moment,
strain veins and muscles in a contrary effort. The nurse
watches, impassive, chewing his pencil, one eye on the
watch, one eye on the specimens gradually presented
him. In doubtful cases, he leaves with the pot to show
it to the doctor.

I receive an unexpected visit: it is Piero Sonnino,
my friend from Rome. “Have you seen how I have
fixed it?” Piero has mild enteritis, has been here for
twenty days, and is quite happy, rested and growing
fatter; he could not care less about the selections and
has decided to stay in Ka-Be until the end of the winter,
at all costs. His method consists of placing himself
in line behind some authentic dysentery patient who

56

Ka-Be

offers a guarantee of success; when it is his turn he
asks for his collaboration (to be rewarded with soup
or bread), and if the latter agrees, and the nurse has
a moment of inattention, he switches over the pots in
the middle of the crowd, and the deed is done. Piero
knows what he is risking, but it has gone well so far.

But life in Ka-Be is not this. It is not the crucial
moments of the selections, it is not the grotesque episodes
of the diarrhoea and lice controls, it is not even the
illnesses.

Ka-Be is the Lager without its physical discomforts.
So that, whoever still has some seeds of conscience,
feels his conscience re-awaken; and in the long empty
days, one speaks of other things than hunger and work
and one begins to consider what they have made us
become, how much they have taken away from us, what
this life is. In this Ka-Be, an enclosure of relative peace,
we have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is
much more in danger than our life; and the old wise
ones, instead of warning us “remember that you must
die”, would have done much better to remind us of
this greater danger that threatens us. If from inside
the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free
men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer
in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.

When one works, one suffers and there is no time
to think: our homes are less than a memory. But
here the time is ours: from bunk to bunk, despite the
prohibition, we exchange visits and we talk and we
talk. The wooden hut, crammed with suffering human¬
ity, is full of words, memories and of another pain.
“ Heimweh ” the Germans call this pain; it is a beautiful
word, it means “ longing for one’s home.”

We know where we come from; the memories of

57

If This is a Man

the world outside crowd our sleeping and our waking
hours, we become aware, with amazement, that we
have forgotten nothing, every memory evoked rises in
front of us painfully clear.

But where we are going we do not know. Will
we perhaps be able to survive the illnesses and escape
the selections, perhaps even resist the work and hunger
which wear us out — but then, afterwards? Here, momen¬
tarily far away from the curses and the blows, we can
re-enter into ourselves and meditate, and then it becomes
clear that we will not return. We travelled here in
the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children
leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves,
have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards
to our silent labours, killed in our spirit long before our
anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry
to the world, together with the sign impressed on his
skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made
of man in Auschwitz.

58

Our Nights

After twenty days of Ka-Be, when my wound
was practically healed, I was discharged to my great
displeasure.

The ceremony is simple, but implies a painful and
dangerous period of readjustment. All who have no
special contacts are not returned to their former Block
and Kommando on leaving Ka-Be, but are enrolled, on
the basis of criteria wholly unknown to me, in any
other hut and given any kind of work. Moreover,
they leave Ka-Be naked; they are given “new” clothes
and shoes (I mean not those left behind at their entry)
which need to be adapted with speed and diligence
to their own persons, which implies effort and expense.
They have to worry about acquiring a new spoon and
knife as at the beginning. An finally — and this is
the gravest aspect — they find themselves inserted in
an unknown environment, among hostile companions
never seen before, with leaders whose characters they
do not know and against whom it is consequently
difficult to guard themselves.

59

If This is a Man

Man’s capacity to dig himself in, to secrete a shell,
to build around himself a tenuous barrier of defence,
even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing
and merits a serious study. It is based on an invaluable
activity of adaptation, partly passive and unconscious,
partly active: of hammering in a nail above his bunk
from which to hang up his shoes; of concluding tacit
pacts of non-aggression with neighbours; of understand¬
ing and accepting the customs and laws of a single
Kommando, a single Block. By virtue of this work,
one manages to gain a certain equilibrium after a few
weeks, a certain degree of security in face of the
unforeseen; one has made oneself a nest, the trauma
of the transplantation is over.

But the man who leaves Ka-Be, naked and almost
always insufficiently cured, feels himself ejected into
the dark and cold of sidereal space. His trousers fall
down, his shoes hurt him, his shirt has no buttons. He
searches for a human contact and only finds backs
turned on him. He is as helpless and vulnerable as
a new-born baby, but the following morning he will
still have to march to work.

It is in these conditions that I find myself when the
nurse entrusts me, after various administrative rites, to
the care of the Blockaltester of Block 45. But at
once a thought fills me with joy: I am in luck, this is
Alberto’s Block.

Alberto is my best friend. He is only twenty-two,
two years younger than me, but none of us Italians
have shown an equal capacity for adaptation. Alberto
entered the Lager with his head high, and lives in
here unscathed and uncorrupted. He understood before
any of us that this life is war; he permitted himself
no indulgences, he lost no time complaining and com¬
miserating with himself and with others, but entered the

60

Our Nights

battle from the beginning. He has the advantage of
intelligence and intuition: he reasons correctly, often
he does not even reason but is equally right. He
understands everything at once: he only knows a little
French but understands whatever the Germans and Poles
tell him. He replies in Italian and with gestures, he
makes himself understood and at once wins sympathy.
He fights for his life but still remains everybody’s
friend. He “knows” whom to corrupt, whom to avoid,
whose compassion to arouse, whom to resist.

Yet (and it is for this virtue of his that his memory
is still dear and close to me) he himself did not become
corrupt. I always saw, and still see in him, the rare
figure of the strong yet peace-loving man against whom
the weapons of night are blunted.

But I did not manage to gain permission to sleep in
a bunk with him, and not even Alberto succeeded,
although by now he enjoyed a certain popularity in
Block 45. It is a pity, because to have a bed-companion
whom one can trust, or at least with whom one can
reach an understanding, is an inestimable advantage;
and besides, it is winter now and the nights are long,
and since we are forced to exchange sweats, smells and
warmth with someone under the same blanket, and in
a width little more than two feet, it is quite desirable
that he be a friend.

In the winter the nights are long and we are allowed
a considerable interval of time to sleep.

The tumult of the Block dies down; the distribution
of the evening ration ended over an hour ago, and only
a few stubborn people continue to scrape the by-now
shining bottom of the bowl, turning it around with care
under the lamp, frowning with attention. Engineer
Kardos moves around the bunks, tending wounded feet
and suppurating corns. This is his trade: there is no one

61

If This is a Man

who will not willingly renounce a slice of bread to
soothe the torment of those numbed sores which bleed
at every step all day. And so, in this manner, honestly,
engineer Kardos solves the problem of living.

From the outside door, secretly and looking around
cautiously, the story-teller comes in. He is seated on
Wachsmann’s bunk and at once gathers around him a
small, attentive, silent crowd. He chants an interminable
Yiddish rhapsody, always the same one, in rhymed
quatrains, of a resigned and penetrating melancholy
(but perhaps I only remember it so because of the time
and the place that I heard it?); from the few words
that I understand, it must be a song that he composed
himself, in which he has enclosed all the life of the
Lager in minute detail. Some are generous and give
the story-teller a pinch of tobacco or a needleful of
thread; others listen intently but give nothing.

The bell rings suddenly for the last ceremony of the
day: u Wer hat kaputt die Schuhe?” (who has broken
shoes?), and at once the noise of forty or fifty claimants
to the exchange breaks out as they rush towards the
Tagesraum in desperate haste, well knowing that only
the first ten, on the best of hypotheses, will be satisfied.

Then there is quiet. The light goes out a first time
for a few seconds to warn the tailors to put away the
precious needle and thread; then the bell sounds in the
distance, the night-guard installs himself, and all the
lights are turned out definitively. There is nothing
to do but to undress and go to bed.

1 do not know who my neighbour is; I am not even
sure that it is always the same person because I have
never seen his face except for a few seconds amidst
the uproar of the reveille, so that I know his back and
his feet much better than his face. He does not work

62

Our Nights

in my Kommando and only comes into the bunk at
curfew time; he wraps himself in the blanket, pushes
me aside with a blow from his bony hips, turns his
back on me and at once begins to snore. Back against
back, I struggle to regain a reasonable area of the straw
mattress: with the base of my back I exercise a progressive
pressure against his back; then I turn around and try
to push with my kness; I take hold of his ankles and
try to place them a little further over so as not to
have his feet next to my face. But is is all in vain: he
is much heavier than me and seems turned to stone in
his sleep.

So I adapt myself to lie like this, forced into immo¬
bility, half-lying on the wooden edge. Nevertheless I am
so tired and stunned that I, too, soon fall asleep, and
I seem to be sleeping on the tracks of a railroad.

The train is about to arrive: one can hear the engine
panting, it is my neighbour. I am not yet so asleep as
not to be aware of the double nature of the engine. It
is, in fact, the very engine which towed the wagons we
had to unload in Buna today. I recognise it by the
fact that even now, as when it passed close by us, I feel
the heat it radiates from its black side. It is puffing,
it is ever nearer, it is on the point of running over me,
but instead it never arrives. My sleep is very light,
it is a veil, if I want I can tear it. I will do it, I want
to tear it, so that I can get off the railway track. Now
I have done it and now I am awake: but not really
awake, only a little more, one step higher on the ladder
between the unconscious and the conscious. I have my
eyes closed and I do not want to open them lest my
sleep escape me, but I can register noises: I am sure
this distant whistle is real, it does not come from an
engine in a dream, it can be heard objectively. It is
the whistle of the small-gauge track, it comes from

63

If This is a Man

the yard where they work at night as well. A long, firm
note, then another one a semitone lower, then again
the first, but short and cut off. This whistle is an
important thing and in some ways essential: we have
heard it so often associated with the suffering of the
work and the camp that it has become a symbol and
immediately evokes an image like certain music or smells.

This is my sister here, with some unidentifiable friend
and many other people. They are all listening to me
and it is this very story that I am telling: the whistle
of three notes, the hard bed, my neighbour whom I
would like to move, but whom I am afraid to wake
as he is stronger than me. I also speak diffusely of our
hunger and of the lice-control, and of the Kapo who
hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself
as I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical,
inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people,
and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot
help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In
fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak con¬
fusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was
not there. My sister looks at me, gets up and goes away
without a word.

A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain
barely remembered pains of one’s early infancy. It is
pain in its pure state, not tempered by a sense of reality
and by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, a pain
like that which makes children cry; and it is better for
me to swim once again up to the surface, but this time
I deliberately open my eyes to have a guarantee in front
of me of being effectively awake.

My dream stands in front of me, still warm, and
although awake I am still full of its anguish: and then
I remember that it is not a haphazard dream, but that
I have dreamed it not once but many times since I

64

Our Nights

arrived here, with hardly any variations of environment
or details. I am now quite awake and I remember
that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided
to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and
the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone. Why
does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated
so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene
of the unlistened-to story?

While I meditate on this, I try to profit from the
interval of wakefulness to shake off the painful remnants
of the preceding sleep, so as not to compromise the
quality of the next dream. I crouch in the dark, I look
around and I listen.

One can hear the sleepers breathing and snoring;
some groan and speak. Many lick their lips and
move their jaws. They are dreaming of eating; this
is also a collective dream. It is a pitiless dream which
the creator of the Tantalus myth must have known.
You not only see the food, you feel it in your hands,
distinct and concrete, you are aware of its rich and
striking smell; someone in the dream even holds it up
to your lips, but every time a different circumstance,
intervenes to prevent the consummation of the act. Then
the dream dissolves and breaks up into its elements, but
it re-forms itself immediately after and begins again,
similar, yet changed; and this without pause, for all
for us, every night and for the whole of our sleep.

It must be later than 11 p.m. because the movement
to and from the bucket next to the night-guard is already
intense. It is an obscene torment and an indelible
shame: every two or three hours we have to get up
to discharge ourselves of the great dose of water which
during the day we are forced to absorb in the form
of soup in order to satisfy our hunger: that same

65

If This is a Man

water which in the evenings swells our ankles and the
hollows of our eyes, conferring on all physiognomies
a likeness of deformation, and whose elimination imposes
an enervating toil on our kidneys.

It is not merely a question of a procession to a
bucket; it is the rule that the last user of the bucket
goes and empties it in the latrines; it is also the rule
that at night one must not leave the hut except in night
uniform (shirt and pants), giving one’s number to the
guard. It is easily foreseeable that the night-guard will
try to exempt his friends, his co-nationals and the
Prominents from this duty. Add to this that the old
members of the camp have refined their senses to such
a degree that, while still in their bunks, they are
miraculously able to distinguish if the level is at a
dangerous point, purely on the basis of the sound that
the sides of the bucket make — with the result that they
almost always manage to avoid emptying it. So the
candidates for the bucket service are a fairly limited
number in each hut, while the total volume to eliminate
is at least 40 gallons, which means that the bucket has to
be emptied about twenty times.

In short, the risk which hangs over us, the inex¬
perienced and non-privileged, when we are driven by
necessity to the bucket every night is quite serious. The
night-guard unexpectedly jumps from his corner and
seizes us, scribbles down our number, hands us a pair
of wooden shoes and the bucket and drives us out into
the middle of the snow, shivering and sleepy. It is our
task to shuffle to the latrine with the bucket which
knocks against our bare calves, disgustingly warm; it
is full beyond all reasonable limit, and inevitably with
the shaking some of the content overflows on our feet,
so that however repugnant this duty may be, it is always

66

Our Nights

preferable that we, and not our neighbour, be ordered
to do it.

So our nights drag on. The dream of Tantalus and
the dream of the story are woven into a texture of more
indistinct images: the suffering of the day, composed
of hunger, blows, cold, exhaustion, fear and promiscuity,
turns at night-time into shapeless nightmares of unheard-
of violence, which in free life would only occur during a
fever. One wakes up at every moment, frozen with
terror, shaking in every limb, under the impression of
an order shouted out by a voice full of anger in a
language not understood. The procession to the bucket
and the thud of bare heels on the wooden floor turns
into another symbolic procession: it is us again, grey and
identical, small as ants, yet so huge as to reach up to
the stars, bound one against the other, countless, covering
the plain as far as the horizon; sometimes melting
into a single substance, a sorrowful turmoil in which we
all feel ourselves trapped and suffocated; sometimes
marching in a circle, without beginning or end, with
a blinding giddiness and a sea of nausea rising from
the praecordia to the gullet; until hunger or cold or
the fullness of our bladders turn our dreams into their
customary forms. We try in vain, when the nightmare
itself or the discomforts wake us, to extricate the various
elements and drive them back, separately, out of the field
of our present attention, so as to defend our sleep from
their intrusion: but as soon as we close our eyes, once
again we feel our brain start up, beyond our control;
it knocks and hums, incapable of rest, it fabricates
phantasms and terrible symbols, and without rest projects
and shapes their images, as a grey fog, on to the screen of
our dreams.

But for the whole duration of the night, cutting

67

If This is a Man

across the alternating sleep, waking and nightmares, the
expectancy and terror of the moment of the reveille
keeps watch. By means of that mysterious faculty of
which many are aware, even without watches we are
able to calculate the moment with close accuracy. At the
hour of the reveille, which varies from season to season
but always falls a fair time before dawn, the camp bell
rings for a long time, and the night-guard in every
hut goes off duty; he switches on the light gets up,
stretches himself and pronounces the daily condemnation:
“ Aufstehen or more often in Polish: “Wstavac."

Very few sleep on till the Wstavac\ it is a moment
of too acute pain for even the deepest sleep not to
dissolve as it approaches. The night guard knows it
and for this reason does not utter it in a tone of command,
but with the quiet and subdued voice of one who knows
that the announcement will find all ears waiting, and will
be heard and obeyed.

Like a stone the foreign word falls to the bottom
of every soul. “Get up”: the illusory barrier of the
warm blankets, the thin armour of sleep, the nightly
evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around
us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to
insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A day begins
like every day, so long as not to allow us reasonably
to conceive its end, so much cold, so much hunger, so
much exhaustion separate us from it: so that it is better
to concentrate one’s attention and desires on the block
of grey bread, which is small but which will certainly
be ours in an hour, and which for five minutes, until
we have devoured it, will form everything that the law
of the place allows us to possess.

At the Wstavac the hurricane starts up again. The
entire hut enters without transition into frantic activity:

68

Our Nights

everybody climbs up and down, remakes his bed and tries
at the same time to dress himself in a manner so as
to leave none of his objects unguarded; the air is filled
with so much dust as to become opaque; the quickest
ones elbow their way through the crowd to go to the
washroom and latrine before the queue begins. The
hut-sweepers at once come onto the scene and drive
everyone out, hitting and shouting at them.

When I have remade my bed and am dressed, I climb
down on to the floor and put on my shoes. The sores
on my feet reopen at once, and a new day begins.

69

The Work

Before Resnyk came, I slept with a Pole whose name
no one knew; he was gentle and silent, with two old
sores on his shin-bones, and during the night gave out
a squalid smell of illness; he also had a weak bladder,
and so woke up and woke me up eight or ten times
a night.

One night he left his gloves in my care and entered
the hospital. For half an hour I hoped that the quarter¬
master would forget that I was the sole occupant of my
bunk, but when the curfew bell had already sounded,
the bed trembled and a long, red-haired fellow, with the
number of the French of Drancy, climbed up beside me.

To have a bed companion of tall stature is a
misfortune and means losing hours of sleep; I always
have tall companions as I am small and two tall ones
cannot sleep together. But it could at once be seen
that Resnyk, despite everything, was not a bad companion.
Fie spoke little and courteously, he was clean, he did
not snore, did not get up more than two or three times
a night and always with great delicacy. In the morning

71

If This is a Man

he offered to make the bed (this is a complicated
and difficult operation, and also carries a notable res¬
ponsibility, as those who remake the bed badly, the
“schlechte Bettenbauer are diligently punished) and
did it quickly and well; so that I experienced a certain
fleeting pleasure later in the roll-call square on seeing
that he had been assigned to my Kommando.

On the march to work, limping in our large wooden
shoes on the icy snow, we exchanged a few words, and
I found out that Resnyk is Polish; he lived twenty years
at Paris but speaks an incredible French. He is thirty,
but like all of us, could be taken for seventeen or fifty.
He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but
it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story;
because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of
stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing
necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening, and
they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, the Ukraine,
and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories
in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a
new Bible?

When we arrived at the yard they took us to the
Eisenrohreplatz, which is the levelling where they unload
the iron pipes, and then the normal things of every day
began. The Kapo made a second roll-call, briefly made
note of the new acquisition and arranged with the civilian
Meister about the day’s work. He then entrusted us to
the Vorarbeiter and went to sleep in the tool cabin,
next to the stove; he is not a Kapo who makes trouble,
for he is not a Jew and so has no fear of losing his
post. The Vorarbeiter distributed the iron levers among
us and the jacks among his friends. The usual little
struggle took place to get the lightest levers, and today
it went badly for me: mine is the twisted one which

72

The Work

weighs perhaps thirty-five pounds; I know that even
if I only had to use it without any weight on it, I would
be dead of exhaustion in half an hour.

Then we left, each with his own lever, limping in
the melting snow. At every step a little snow and mud
stuck to the wooden soles of our shoes, until one walked
unsteadily on two heavy, formless masses of which it
was impossible to free oneself; then, when one suddenly
came unstuck, it felt as if one leg was a hand shorter
than the other.

Today we have to unload an enormous, cast-iron
cylinder from the wagon: I think it is a synthesis tube
and will weigh several tons. This is better for us, as it
is notoriously less exhausting to work with big loads
than with small ones; in fact, the work is better subdi¬
vided, and we are given adequate tools. However, it is
dangerous, one dare not let one’s attention wander, a
moment’s oversight is sufficient to find oneself crushed.

Meister Nogalla, the Polish superintendent, rigid,
serious and taciturn, supervised in person the unloading
operation. Now the cylinder lies on the ground and
Meister Nogalla says: “Bohlen holen

Our hearts sink. It means “carry the sleepers” in
order to build the path in the soft mud on which the
cylinder will be pushed by lever into the factory. But
the wooden sleepers are mortized in the ground and
weigh about 175 pounds; they are more or less at the
limits of our strength. The more robust of us, working
in pairs, are able to carry sleepers for a few hours; for
me it is a torture, the load maims my shoulder-bone.
After the first journey I am deaf and almost blind from
the effort, and I would stoop to any baseness to avoid
the second journey.

I will try and place myself with Resnyk; he seems
a good worker and being taller will support the greater

73

If This is a Man

part of the weight. I know that it is in the natural
order of events that Resnyk refuse me with disdain and
form a pair with another more robust individual; then
I will ask to go to the latrine and I will remain there
as long as possible, and afterwards I will try to hide,
with the certainty of being immediately traced, mocked
at and hit; but anything is better than this work.

Instead Resnyk accepts, and even more, lifts up the
sleeper by himself and rests it on my right shoulder with
care; then he lifts up the other end, stoops to place it
on his left shoulder and we leave.

The sleeper is coated with snow and mud; at every
step it knocks against my ear and the snow slides down
my neck. After fifty steps I am at the limit of what a
person is theoretically able to support: my knees bend,
my shoulder aches as if pressed in a vice, my equilibrium
is in danger. At every step I feel my shoes sucked away
by the greedy mud, by this omnipresent Polish mud whose
monotonous horror fills our days.

I bite deeply into my lips; we know well that to
gain a small, extraneous pain serves as a stimulant to
mobilize our last reserves of energy. The Kapos also
know it: some of them beat us from pure bestiality
and violence, but others beat us when we are under a
load almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with
exhortations, as cart-drivers do with willing horses.

When we reach the cylinder we unload the sleeper
on the ground and I remain stiff, with empty eyes, open
mouth and hanging arms, sunk in the ephemeral and
negative ecstasy of the cessation of pain. In a twilight
of exhaustion I wait for the push which will force me
to begin work again, and I try to take advantage of
every second of waiting to recuperate some energy.

But the push never comes: Resnyk touches my elbow,
we return as slowly as possible to the sleepers. There

74

The Work

the others are wandering around in pairs, all trying to
delay as long as possible before submitting to the load.

“ Allons, petit, at t rape." This sleeper is dry and a
little lighter, but at the end of the second journey I go
to the V orarbeiter and ask to go the latrine.

We have the advantage that our latrine is rather
far; this permits us, once a day, a slightly longer absence
than normal. Moreover, as it is also forbidden to go
there alone, Wachsmann, the weakest and most clumsy
of the Kommando, has been invested with the duty
of Scheissbegleiter, “toilet companion”; by virtue of
this appointment, Wachsmann is responsible for any
hypothetical ( laughable hypothesis!) attempt to escape,
and more realistically, for every delay.

As my request was accepted, I leave in the mud
and the grey snow among the scraps of metal, escorted
by the small Wachsmann. I never manage to reach
an understanding with him, as we have no language
in common; but his comrades tell me that he is a rabbi,
in fact a Melamed, a person learned in the Torah,
and even more, in his own village in Galicia, was famed
as a healer and a thaumaturge. Nor am I far from
believing it when I think that this thin, fragile and
soft figure has managed to work for two years without
falling ill and without dying, but on the contrary is
lit up by an amazing vitality in actions and words
and spends long evenings discussing Talmudic questions
incomprehensibly in Yiddish and Hebrew with Mendi,
who is a modernist rabbi.

The latrine is an oasis of peace. It is a provisional
latrine which the Germans have not yet provided with
the customary wooden partitions to separate the various
divisions: “Nur fiir Englander“Nur fur Polen“Nur
fur Ukrainische Frauen," and so on, with, a little apart
“Nur fiir Haftlinge." Inside, shoulder by shoulder, sit

75

If This is a Man

four hollow-faced Haftlinge; a bearded old Russian
worker with the blue stripe OST on his left arm; a
Polish boy, with a large white P on his back and chest;
an English P.o.W., with his face splendidly shaven and
rosy and his khaki uniform neat, ironed and clean,
except for a large KG ( Kriegsgefangener ) on his back.
A fifth Haftling stands at the door patiently and
monotonously asking every civilian who enters loosening
his belt: “Etes-vous fran$aisV’

When I return to work the lorries with the rations
can be seen passing, which means it is ten o’ clock.
It is already a respectable hour, as the midday pause
can be almost glimpsed in the fog of the remote future,
allowing us to derive a little more strength from the
expectation.

I do another two or three trips with Resnyk, searching
attentively, even going to distant piles, to find lighter
sleepers, but by now all the best ones have already
been carried and only the other ones remain, repellent,
with sharp corners, heavy with mud and ice, with metal
plates nailed in to fix the rails.

When Franz comes to call Wachsmann to go and
claim the ration, it means that it is already eleven o’clock
and the morning has almost finished — no one thinks
about the afternoon. Then the corvee returns at 11.30,
and the standard interrogation begins: how much soup
today, what quality, if we were given it from the top
or the bottom of the vat; I force myself not to ask
these questions, but I cannot help listening eagerly to
the replies, sniffing at the smoke carried by the wind
from the kitchen.

And at last, like a celestial meteor, superhuman and
impersonal like a sign from heaven, the midday siren
explodes, granting a brief respite to our anonymous
and concord tiredness and hunger. And the usual things

76

The Work

happen again: we all run to the hut, and we queue
up with our bowls ready and we all have an animal
hurry to swell our bellies with the warm stew, but no
one wants to be first, as the first person receives the most
liquid ration. As usual, the Kapo mocks and insults
us for our voracity and takes care not to stir the pot,
as the bottom belongs notoriously to him. Then comes
the bliss (positive, from the belly) of the distension
and warmth of the stomach and of the cabin around
the noisy stove. The smokers, with miserly and reverent
gestures, roll a thin cigarette, while everybody’s clothes,
humid with mud and snow, give out a dense smoke at
the heat of the stove, with the smell of a kennel or of
a sheepfold.

A tacit convention ordains that no one speak: within
a minute everyone is sleeping, jammed elbow against
elbow, falling suddenly forwards and recovering with a
stiffening of the back. Behind the barely-closed eyelids,
dreams break out violently, the usual dreams. To be at
home, in a wonderfully hot bath. To be at home,
seated at a table. To be at home, and tell the story
of this hopeless work of ours, of this never-ending
hunger, of the slave’s way of sleeping.

Then, in the bosom of the vapours of our torpid
digestions, a painful nucleus condenses, and jars us and
grows until it crosses the threshold of the consciousness
and takes away the joy of sleep. “Er wird bald ein Uhr
sein it is almost one o’clock. Like a rapid, voracious
cancer, it kills our sleep and oppresses us with a
foreboding anguish: we listen to the wind blowing
outside, and to the light rustle of the snow against the
window, “es wird schnell ein Uhr sein.” While everyone
clings on to his sleep, so as not to allow it to abandon
him, all senses are taut with the horror of the signal

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If This is a Man

which is about to come, which is outside the door,
which is here....

Here it is. A thud at the window: Meister Nogalla
has thrown a snowball against the window pane, and
now stands stiffly outside, holding his watch with its
face turned towards us. The Kapo gets up, stretches
himself, and says quietly as one who does not doubt
that he will be obeyed: “Alles herausf all out.

Oh, if one could only cry! Oh, if one could only
affront the wind as we once used to, on equal terms,
and not as we do here, like cringing dogs.

We are outside and everyone picks up his lever.
Resnyk drops his head between his shoulders, pulls his
beret over his ears and lifts his face up to the low grey
sky where the inexorable snow whirls around: “Si j’avey
une chien, je ne le chasse pas dehors

78

A Good Day

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted
in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human
substance. Free men give many names to this purpose,
and many think and talk about its nature. But for us
the question is simpler.

Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach
the spring. At the moment we care about nothing
else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any
other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly
lined up in the roll-call square for the time to leave
for work, while every breath of wind penetrates our
clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenceless
bodies, and everything is grey around us, and we are grey;
in the morning, when it is still dark, we all look at
the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder
season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every
day: today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little
warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the
cold will call a truce and we will have one enemy less.

Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time
from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white

If This is a Man

and distant, and only warms the skin, but when it
dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our
colourless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarmth
through my clothes I understood how men can worship
the sun.

“Das Schlimmste 1st voruberf said Ziegler, turning
his pointed shoulders to the sun: the worst is over. Next
to us there is a group of Greeks, those admirable and
terrible Jews of Salonica, tenacious, thieving, wise,
ferocious and united, so determined to live, such pitiless
opponents in the struggle for life; those Greeks who
have conquered in the kitchens and in the yards, and
whom even the Germans respect and the Poles fear.
They are in their third year of camp, and nobody knows
better than them what the camp means. They now stand
closely in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, and sing one
of their interminable chants.

Felicio the Greek knows me. “L’annee prochaine
a la maison !” he shouts at me, and adds: “a la maison
par la ChemineeV' Felicio has been at Birkenau. And
they continue to sing and beat their feet in time and
grow drunk on songs.

When we finally left by the main entrance of the
camp, the sun was quite high and the sky serene.
At midday one could see the mountains; to the west,
the steeple of Auschwitz (a steeple here!), and all
around the barrage balloons. The smoke from the
Buna lay still in the cold air, and a row of low hills
could be seen, green with forests: and our hearts tighten
because we all know that Birkenau is there, that our
women finished there, and that soon we too will finish
there; but we are not used to seeing it.

For the first time we are aware that on both sides
of the road, even here, the meadows are green; because,
without a sun, a meadow is as if it were not green.

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A Good Day

The Buna is not: the Buna is desperately and
essentially opaque and grey. This huge entanglement of
iron, concrete, mud and smoke is the negation of beauty.
Its roads and buildings are named like us, by numbers
or letters, or by weird and sinister names. Within its
bounds not a blade of grass grows, and the soil is
impregnated with the poisonous saps of coal and
petroleum, and the only things alive are machines and
slaves — and the former are more alive than the latter.

The Buna is as large as a city; besides the managers
and German technicians, forty thousand foreigners work
there, and fifteen to twenty languages are spoken. All
the foreigners live in different Lagers which surround
the Buna: the Lager of the English prisoners-of-war,
the Lager of the Ukrainian women, the Lager of the
French volunteers, and others we do not know. Our
Lager (Judenlager, Vernichtungslager, Kazett) by itself
provides ten thousand workers who come from all the
nations of Europe. We are the slaves of the slaves,
whom all can give orders to, and our name is the
number which we carry tattooed on our arm and sewn
on our jacket.

The Carbide Tower, which rises in the middle of
Buna and whose top is rarely visible in the fog, was
built by us. Its bricks were called Ziegel, briques, tegula,
cegli, kamenny, mattoni, teglak, and they were cemented
by hate; hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel,
and it is this that we call it: — Babelturm, Bobelturm;
and in it we hate the insane dream of grandeur of our
masters, their contempt for God and men, for us men.

And today just as in the old fable, we all feel, and
the Germans themselves feel, that a curse — not
trascendent and divine, but inherent and historical —

81

If This is a Man

hangs over the insolent building based on the confusion
of languages and erected in defiance of heaven like a
stone oath.

As will be told, the Buna factory, on which the
Germans were busy for four years and for which
countless of us suffered and died, never produced a
pound of synthetic rubber.

But today the eternal puddles, on which a rainbow
veil of petroleum trembles, reflect the serene sun. Pipes,
rails, boilers, still cold from the freezing of the night,
are dripping with dew. The earth dug up from the
pits, the piles of coal, the blocks of concrete, exhale
in light vapours the humidity of the winter.

Today is a good day. We look around like blind
people who have recovered their sight, and we look
at each other. We have never seen each other in
sunlight: someone smiles. If it was not for the hunger!

For human nature is such that grief and pain — even
simultaneosly suffered — do not add up as a whole
in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the
greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is
providential and is our means of surviving in the camp.
And this is the reason why so often in free life one
hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is
not a question of a human incapacity for a state of
absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge
of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so
that the single name of the major cause is given to
all its causes, which are composite and set out in an
order of urgency. And if the most immediate cause
of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed
to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a
whole series of others.

So that as soon as the cold, which throughout the
winter had seemed our only enemy, had ceased, we

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A Good Day

became aware of our hunger; and repeating the same
error, we now say: “If it was not for the hunger!...’'

But how could one imagine not being hungry? The
Lager is hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger.

On the other side of the road a steam-shovel is
working. Its mouth, hanging from its cables, opens
wide its steel jaws, balances a moment as if uncertain
in its choice, then rushes upon the soft, clayey soil and
snaps it up voraciously, while a satisfied snort of thick
white smoke rises from the control cabin. Then it
rises, turns half around, vomits backwards its mouthful
and begins again.

Leaning on our shovels, we stop to watch, fascinated.
At every bite of its mouth our mouths also open, our
Adam s apples dance up and down, wretchedly visible
under the flaccid skin. We are unable to tear ourselves
away from the sight of the steam-shovel’s meal.

Sigi is seventeen years old and is hungrier than
everybody, although he is given a little soup every
evening by his probably not disinterested protector. He
had begun to speak of his home in Vienna and of his
mother, but then he slipped on to the subject of food
and now he talks endlessly about some marriage luncheon
and remembers with genuine regret that he failed to
finish his third plate of bean soup. And everyone
tells him to keep quiet, but within ten minutes Bela
is describing his Hungarian countryside and the fields
of maize and a recipe to make meat-pies with corncobs
and lard and spices and... and he is cursed, sworn at,
and a third one begins to describe....

How weak our flesh is! I am perfectly well aware
how vain these fantasies of hunger are, but dancing
before my eyes I see the spaghetti which we had just
cooked, Vanda, Luciana, Franco and I, at the sorting-
camp when we suddenly heard the news that we would

83

If This is a Man

leave for here the following day; and we were eating
it (it was so good, yellow, filling), and we stopped,
fools, stupid as we were — if we had only known!
And if it happened again.... Absurd. If there is one
thing sure in this world it is certainly this: that it will
not happen to us a second time.

Fischer, the newest arrival, pulls out of his pocket
a bundle, tied together with the painstaking exactitude
of the Hungarians, and inside there is a half-ration of
bread: half the bread of this morning. It is notorious
that only the High Numbers keep their bread in their
pockets; none of us old ones are able to preserve our
bread for an hour. Various theories circulate to justify
this incapacity of ours: bread eaten a little at a time is
not wholly assimilated; the nervous tension needed to
preserve the bread without touching it when one is
hungry is in the highest degree harmful and debilitating;
bread which is turning stale soon loses its alimentary
value, so that the sooner it is eaten, the more nutritious
it is; Alberto says that hunger and bread in one’s pocket
are terms of opposite sign which automatically cancel
each other out and cannot exist in the same individual;
and the majority affirm justly that, in the end, one’s
stomach is the securest safe against thefts and extortions.
“ Moi, on m’a jamais vole mon pain!” David snarls,
hitting his concave stomach: but he is unable to take
his eyes off Fischer who chews slowly and methodically,
“lucky” enough to still have half-a-ration at ten in the
morning: “Sacre veinard, va!”

But it is not only because of the sun that today is a
happy day: at midday a surprise awaits us. Besides
the normal morning ration, we discover in the hut a
wonderful pot of over eleven gallons, one of those from

84

A Good Day

the Factory Kitchen, almost full. Templer looks at us,
triumphant; this “organization” is his work.

Templer is the official organizer of the Kommando:
he has an astonishing nose for the soup of civilians, like
bees for flowers. Our Kapo, who is not a bad Kapo,
leaves him a free hand, and with reason: Templer slinks
off, following imperceptible tracks like a bloodhound,
and returns with the priceless news that the Methanol
Polish workers, one mile from here, have abandoned
ten gallons of soup that tasted rancid, or that a wagon¬
load of turnips is to be found unguarded on the siding
next to the Factory Kitchen.

Today there are ninety pints and we are fifteen,
Kapo and Vorarbeiter included. This means six pints
each; we will have two at midday as well as the normal
ration, and will come back to the hut in turns for the
other four during the afternoon, besides being granted
an extra five minutes’ suspension of work to fill
ourselves up.

What more could one want? Even our work seems
light, with the prospect of four hot, dense pints waiting
for us in the hut. The Kapo comes to us periodically
and calls: “Wer hat noch zu f res sen?" He does not
say it from derision or to sneer, but because this way
of eating on our feet, furiously, burning our mouths and
throats, without time to breathe, really is “fressen,” the
way of eating of animals, and certainly not “ essen the
human way of eating, seated in front of a table,
religiously. “ Fressen” is exactly the word, and is used
currently among us.

Meister Nogalla watches and closes an eye at our
absences from work. Meister Nogalla also has a hungry
look about him, and if it was not for the social
conventions, perhaps he would not despise a couple
of pints of our warm broth.

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If This is a Man

Templer’s turn comes. By plebiscitary consensus,
he has been allowed ten pints, taken from the bottom
of the pot. For Templer is not only a good organizer,
but an exceptional soup-eater, and is uniquely able to
empty his bowels at his own desire and in anticipation
of a large meal, which contributes to his amazing gastric
capacity.

Of this gift of his, he is justly proud, and everybody,
even Meister Nogalla, knows about it. Accompanied
by the gratitude of all, Templer the benefactor enters
the latrine for a few moments and comes out beaming
and ready, and amidst the general benevolence prepares
to enjoy the fruits of his work:

“Du, Templer, hast du Platz genug fur die Suppe
gemacht ?”

At sunset, the siren of the Feierabend sounds, the
end of work; and as we are all satiated, at least for
a few hours, no quarrels arise, we feel good, the Kapo
feels no urge to hit us, and we are able to think of
our mothers and wives, which usually does not happen.
For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner
of free men.

86

This Side of Good
and Evil

We had an incorrigible tendency to see a symbol and
a sign in every event. For seventy days we had been
waiting for the Waschetauschen, the ceremony of the
change of underclothes, and a rumour circulated persis¬
tently that the change of washing had not taken place
because, as the front had moved forward, the Germans
were unable to gather together new transport at Auschwitz,
and “therefore” the liberation was near. And equally,
the opposite interpretation circulated: that the delay in
the change was a sure sign of an approaching integral
liquidation of the camp. Instead the change took place,
and as usual, the directors of the Lager took every care to
make it occur unexpectedly and at the same time in
all the huts.

It has to be realized that cloth is lacking in the
Lager and is precious; and that our only way of acquiring
a rag to blow our noses, or a pad for our shoes, is
precisely that of cutting off the tail of a shirt at the
time of the exchange. If the shirt has long sleeves,

87

If This is a Man

one cuts the sleeves; if not, one has to make do with
a square from the bottom, or by unstitching one of the
many patches. But in all cases a certain time is needed
to get hold of needle and thread and to carry out
the operation with some skill, so as not to leave the
damage too obvious at the time of handing it in. The
dirty, tattered washing is passed on, thrown together,
to the tailor’s workshop in the camp, where it is
summarily pieced up, sent to the steam disinfection (not
washed!) and is then re-distributed; hence the need to
make the exchanges as unexpected as possibile, so as
to save the soiled washing from the above mutilations.

But, as always happens, it was not possible to prevent
a cunning glance piercing through the canvas of the
cart which was leaving after the disinfection, so that
within a few minutes the camp knew of the imminence
of a Waschetauschen, and in addition, that this time there
were new shirts from a convoy of Hungarians which
had arrived three days ago.

The news had immediate repercussions. All who
illegally possessed second shirts, stolen or organized,
or even honestly bought with bread as a protection against
the cold or to invest capital in a moment of prosperity,
immediately rushed to the Exchange Market, hoping
to arrive in time to barter their reserve shirts for food
products before the flood of new shirts, or the certainty
of their arrival, irreparably devaluated the price of the
article.

The Market is always very active. Although every
exchange (in fact, every form of possession) is explicitly
forbidden, and although frequent swoops of Kapos or
Blockalteste send merchants, customers and the curious
periodically flying, nevertheless, the northeast corner of
the Lager (significantly the corner furthest from the SS
huts) is permanently occupied by a tumultuous throng,

88

This Side of Good and Evil

in the open during the summer, in a wash-room during
the winter, as soon as the squads return from work.

Here scores of prisoners driven desperate by hunger
prowl around, with lips half-open and eyes gleaming,
lured by a deceptive instinct to where the merchandise
shown makes the gnawing of their stomachs more acute
and their salivation more assiduous. In the best of cases
they possess a miserable half-ration of bread which,
with painful effort, they have saved since the morning,
in the senseless hope of a chance to make an advantageous
bargain with some ingenuous person, unaware of the
prices of the moment. Some of these, with savage patience,
acquire with their half-ration two pints of soup which,
once in their possession, they subject to a methodical
examination with a view to extracting the few pieces
of potato lying at the bottom; this done, they exchange
it for bread, and the bread for another two pints to
denaturalize, and so on until their nerves are exhausted,
or until some victim, catching them in the act, inflicts
on them a severe lesson, exposing them to public derision.
Of the same kind are those who come to the market
to sell their only shirt; they well know what will happen
on the next occasion that the Kapo finds out that they are
bare underneath their jackets. The Kapo will ask them
what they have done with their shirt; it is a purely
rhetorical question, a formality useful only to begin
the game. They will reply that their shirt was stolen
in the wash-room; this reply is equally customary, and
is not expected to be believed; in fact, even the stones
of the Lager know that ninety nine times out of a
hundred whoever has no shirt has sold it because of
hunger, and that in any case one is responsible for
one’s shirt because it belongs to the Lager. Then the
Kapo will beat them, they will be issued another shirt,
and sooner or later they will begin again.

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If This is a Man

The professional merchants stand in the market, each
one in his normal corner; first among them come the
Greeks, as immobile and silent as sphinxes, squatting
on the ground behind their bowls of thick soup, the
fruits of their labour, of their co-operation and of their
national solidarity. The Greeks have been reduced to
very few by now, but they have made a contribution
of the first importance to the physiognomy of the camp
and to the international slang in circulation. Everyone
knows that “ caravana ” is the bowl, and that comedera
es buena ” means that the soup is good; the word that
expresses the generic idea of theft is “ klepsiklepsi ” of
obvious Greek origin. These few survivors from the
Jewish colony of Salonica, with their two languages,
Spanish and Greek, and their numerous activities are
the repositories of a concrete, mundane, conscious wisdom,
in which the traditions of all the Mediterranean
civilizations blend together. That this wisdom was
transformed in the camp into the systematic and scientific
practice of theft and seizure of positions and the monopoly
of the bargaining Market, should not let one forget
that their aversion to gratuitous brutality, their amazing
consciousness of the survival of at least a potential
human dignity made of the Greeks the most coherent
national nucleus in Lager, and in this respect, the most
civilized.

At the Market you can find specialists in kitchen
thefts, their jackets swollen with strange bulges. While
there is a virtually stable price for soup (half a ration
of bread for two pints), the quotations for turnips,
carrots, potatoes are extremely variable and depend
greatly, among other factors, on the diligence and the
cormptibility of the guards at the stores.

Mahorca is sold. Mahorca is a third-rate tobacco,
cmde and wooden, which is officially on sale at the

90

This Side of Good and Evil

canteen in one and a half ounce packets, in exchange
for the prize-coupons that the Buna ought to distribute
to the best workers. Such a distribution occurs irregularly,
with great parsimony and open injustice, so that the
greatest number of the coupons end up, either legitimately
or through abuse of authority, in the hands of the
Kapos and of the Prominents, nevertheless the prize-
coupons still circulate on the market in the form of
money, and their value changes in strict obedience to
the laws of classical economics.

There have been periods in which the prize-coupon
was worth one ration of bread, then one and a quarter,
even one and a third; one day it was quoted at one
and a half ration, but then the supply of Mahorca to
the canteen failed, so that, lacking a coverage, the
money collapsed at once to a quarter of a ration. Another
boom period occurred for a singular reason: the arrival of
a fresh contingent of robust Polish girls in place of the
old inmates of the Frauenblock. In fact, as the prize-
coupon is valid for entry to the Frauenblock (for the
criminals and the politicals; not for the Jews, who on
the other hand, do not feel affected by this restriction),
those interested actively and rapidly cornered the market:
hence the revaluation, which, in any case, did not last
long.

Among the ordinary Haftlinge there are not many
who search for Mahorca to smoke it personally; for
the most part it leaves the camp and ends in the hands
of the civilian workers of the Buna. The traffic is an
instance of a kind of “ kombtnacja ” frequently practised:
the Haftling, somehow saving a ration of bread, invests
it in Mahorca; he cautiously gets in touch with a civilian
addict who acquires the Mahorca, paying in cash with
a portion of bread greater than that initially invested.
The Haftling eats the surplus, and puts back on the

91

If This is a Man

market the remaining ration. Speculations of this kind
establish a tie between the internal economy of the
Lager and the economic life of the outside world: the
accidental failure of the distribution of tobacco among
the civilian population of Cracow, overcoming the barrier
of barbed wire which segregates us from human society,
had an immediate repercussion in camp, provoking
a notable rise in the quotation of Mahorca, and
consequently of the prize-coupon.

The process outlined above is no more than the
most simple of examples: another more complex one
is the following. The Haftling acquires in exchange
for Mahorca or bread, or even obtains as a gift from
a civilian, some abominable, ragged, dirty shred of a
shirt, which must however have three holes suitable to
fit more or less over the head and arms. So long as
it only carries signs of wear, and not of artificially
created mutilations, such an object, at the time of the
Wdschetauschen , is valid as a shirt and carries the right
of an exchange; at the most, the person who presents
it will receive an adequate measure of blows for having
taken so little care of camp clothing.

Consequently, within the Lager, there is no great
difference in value between a shirt worthy of the name
and a tattered thing full of patches; the Haftling described
above will have no difficulty in finding a comrade in
possession of a shirt of commercial value who is unable
to capitalize on it as he is not in touch with civilian
workers, either because of his place of work, or through
difficulties of language or intrinsic incapacity. This latter
will be satisfied with a modest amount of bread for the
exchange, and in fact the next Wdschetauschen will
to a certain extent re-establish equilibrium, distributing
good and bad washing in a perfectly casual manner.
But the first Haftling will be able to smuggle the good

92

This Side of Good and Evil

shirt into Buna and sell it to the original civilian (or to
any other) for four, six, even ten rations of bread. This
high margin of profit is correlative to the gravity of
the risk of leaving camp wearing more than one shirt
or re-entering with none.

There are many variations on this theme. There
are some who do not hesitate to have the gold fillings
of their teeth extracted to sell them in Buna for bread
or tobacco. But the most common of cases is that such
traffic takes place through an intermediary. A “high
number,” that is, a new arrival, only recently but
sufficiently besotted by hunger and by the extreme tension
of life in the camp, is noticed by a “low number” for
the number of his gold teeth; the “low” offers the “high”
three or four rations of bread to be paid in return for
extraction. If the high number accepts, the low one
pays, carries the gold to Buna, and if in contact with
a civilian of trust, from whom he fears neither denuncia¬
tion nor fraudulent dealing, he can make a gain of
ten or even as much as twenty or more rations, which
are paid to him gradually, one or two a day. It is
worth noting in this respect that contrary to what takes
place in Buna, the maximum total of any transaction
negotiated within the camp is four rations of bread,
because it would be practically impossible either to make
contracts on credit, or to preserve a larger quantity of
bread from the greed of others or one’s own hunger.

Traffic with civilians is a characteristic element of the
Arbeitslager, and as we have seen, determines its economic
life. On the other hand, it is a crime, explicitly foreseen
by the camp regulations, and considered equivalent to
“political” crimes; so that it is punished with particular
severity. The Haftling convicted of “Handel mit
Zivilisten ,” unless he can rely on powerful influences,
ends up at Gleiwitz III, at Janina or at Heidebreck

93

If This is a Man

in the coal-mines; which means death from exhaustion
in the course of a few weeks. Moreover, his accomplice,
the civilian worker, may also be denounced to the
competent German authority and condemned to pass a
period in Vernichtungslager, under the same conditions
as us; a period varying, as far as I can see, from a
fortnight to eight months. The workmen who experience
this retaliation have their possessions taken away like
us on their entry, but their personal effects are kept
in a special store-room. They are not tattooed and they
keep their hair, which makes them easily recognizable,
but for the whole duration of the punishment they
are subjected to the same work and the same discipline
as us — except, of course, the selections.

They work in separate Kommandos and they have
no contact of any sort with the common Haftlinge.
In fact, the Lager is for them a punishment, and if they do
not die of exhaustion or illness they can expect to return
among men; if they could communicate with us, it would
create a breach in the wall which keeps us dead to
the world, and a ray of light into the mystery which
prevails among free men about our condition. For us,
on the contrary, the Lager is not a punishment; for us,
no end is foreseen and the Lager is nothing but a
manner of living assigned to us, without limits of time,
in the bosom of the Germanic social organism.

One section of the camp itself is in fact set aside
for civilian workers of all nationalities who are compelled
to stay there for a longer or shorter period in expiation
of their illicit relations with Haftlinge. This section is
separated from the rest of the camp by barbed wire,
and is called E-Lager, and its guests E-Haftlinge. “E” is
the initial for “ Erziehung ” which means education.

All the bargaining-transactions outlined above are
based on the smuggling of materials belonging to the

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Lager. This is why the SS are so eager to suppress
them: the very gold of our teeth is their property, as
sooner or later, torn from the mouths of the living or
the dead, it ends up in their hands. So it is natural
that they should take care that the gold does not leave
the camp.

But against theft in itself, the direction of the camp
has no prejudice. The attitude of open connivance by
the SS as regards smuggling in the opposite direction
shows this clearly.

Here things are generally more simple. It is a
question of stealing or receiving any of the various tools,
utensils, materials, products, etc. with which we come in
daily contact in Buna in the course of our work, of
introducing them into the camp in the evening, of
finding a customer and of effecting the exchange for
bread or soup. This traffic is intense: for certain articles,
although they are necessary for the normal life of the
Lager, this method of theft in Buna is the only and
regular way of provisioning. Typical are the instances
of brooms, paint, electric wire, grease for shoes. The
traffic in this last item will serve as an example.

As we have stated elsewhere, the camp regulations
prescribe the greasing and polishing of shoes every
morning, and every Blockdltester is responsible to the
SS for obedience to this order by all the men in his
hut. One would think that each hut would enjoy a
periodic assignment of grease for shoes, but this is not
so; the mechanism is completely different. It needs to
be stated first that each hut receives an assignment of
soup somewhat higher than that prescribed for regulation
rations; the extra is divided according to the discretion
of the Blockdltester, who first of all distributes the
gifts to his friends and proteges, then the recompense
to the hut-sweepers, to the night-guards, to the lice-

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controllers and to all other prominents and functionaries
in the hut. What is still left over (and every smart
Blockaltester makes sure that there is always some over)
is used precisely for these acquisitions.

The rest is obvious. Those Haftlinge at Buna who
have the chance to fill their bowl with grease or
machine-oil (or anything else: any blackish and greasy
substance is considered suitable for the purpose), on
their return to the camp in the evening, make a systematic
tour of the huts until they find a Blockaltester who has
run out of the article and wants a fresh supply. In
addition, every hut usually has its habitual supplier,
who has been allotted a fixed daily recompense on
condition that he provides the grease every time that
the reserve is about to ran out.

Every evening, beside the doors of the Tagesrdume,
the groups of suppliers stand patiently around; on their
feet for hours and hours in the rain or snow, they
discuss excitedly matters relating to the fluctuation of
prices and value of the prize-coupon. Every now and
again one of them leaves the group, makes a quick
visit to the Market, and returns with the latest news.

Besides the articles already described, there are
innumerable others to be found in Buna, which might
be useful to the Block or welcomed by the Blockaltester,
or might excite the interest or curiosity of the prominents:
light-bulbs, ordinary or shaving-soap, files, pliers, sacks,
nails; methylic alcohol is sold to make drinks; while
petrol is useful for the rudimentary lighters, prodigies
of the secret industry of the Lager craftsmen.

In this complex network of thefts and counter-thefts,
nourished by the silent hostility between the SS command
and the civilian authorities of the Buna, Ka-Be plays
a part of prime importance. Ka-Be is the place of least
resistance, where the regulations can most easily be

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avoided and the surveillance of the Kapos eluded.
Everyone knows that it is the nurses themselves who
send back on the market, at low prices, the clothes and
shoes of the dead and of the selected who leave naked
for Birkenau; it is the nurses and doctors who export
the restricted sulphonamides to Buna, selling them to
civilians for articles of food.

The nurses also make huge profits from the trade
in spoons. The Lager does not provide the new arrivals
with spoons, although the semi-liquid soup cannot be
consumed without them. The spoons are manufactured
in Buna, secretly and in their spare moments, by Haftlinge
who work as specialists in the iron and tin-smith
Kommandos: they are rough and clumsy tools, shaped
from iron-plate worked by hammer, often with a sharp
handle-edge to serve at the same time as a knife to cut
the bread. The manufacturers themselves sell them
directly to the new arrivals: an ordinary spoon is worth
half a ration, a knife-spoon three quarters of a ration
of bread. Now it is a law that although one can enter
Ka-Be with one’s spoon, one cannot leave with it. At
the moment of release, before the clothes are given, the
healthy patient’s spoon is confiscated by the nurses and
placed on sale in the Market. Adding the spoons of
the patients about to leave to those of the dead and
selected, the nurses receive the gains of the sale of
about fifty spoons every day. On the other hand, the
dismissed patients are forced to begin work again with
the initial disadvantage of half a ration of bread, set
aside to acquire a new spoon.

Finally, Ka-Be is the main customer and receiver
of thefts occurring in Buna: of the soup assigned to
Ka-Be, a good forty pints are set aside every day as
the theft-fund to acquire the most varied of goods from
the specialists. There are those who steal thin rubber

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If This is a Man

tubing which is used in Ka-Be for enemas and for
stomach-tubes; others offer coloured pencils and inks,
necessary for Ka-Be’s complicated book-keeping system;
and thermometers and glass instruments and chemicals,
which come from the Buna stores in the Haftlinge’s
pockets and are used in the infirmary as sanitary
equipment.

And I would not like to be accused of immodesty
if I add that it was our idea, mine and Alberto’s, to
steal the rolls of graph-paper from the thermographs
of the Desiccation Department, and offer them to the
Medical Chief of Ka-Be with the suggestion that they
be used as paper for pulse-temperature charts.

In conclusion: theft in Buna, punished by the civil
direction, is authorized and encouraged by the SS; theft
in camp, severely repressed by the SS, is considered by
the civilians as a normal exchange operation; theft among
Haftlinge is generally punished, but the punishment
strikes the thief and the victim with equal gravity. We
now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning
in the Lager of the words “good” and “evil”, “just” and
“unjust”; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture
we have outlined and of the examples given above,
how much of our ordinary moral world could survive
on this side of the barbed wire.

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The Drowned
and the Saved

What we have so far said and will say concerns the
ambiguous life of the Lager. In our days many men
have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the
bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that
we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good
to retain any memory of this exceptional human state.

To this question we feel that we have to reply in
the affirmative. We are in fact convinced that no human
experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis,
and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive,
can be deduced from this particular world which we
are describing. We would also like to consider that
the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and
social experiment.

Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition,
origin, language, culture and customs are enclosed within
barbed wire: there they live a regular, controlled life
which is identical for all and inadequate to all needs,
and which is much more rigorous than any experimenter
could have set up to establish what is essential and

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If This is a Man

what adventitious to the conduct of the human animal
in the struggle for life.

We do not believe in the most obvious and facile
deduction: that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic
and stupid in his conduct once every civilized institution
is taken away, and that the Haftling is consequently
nothing but a man without inhibitions. We believe,
rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the
face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many
social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.

But another fact seems to us worthy of attention:
there comes to light the existence of two particularly
well differentiated categories among men — the saved
and the drowned. Other pairs of opposites (the good
and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the cowards and
the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are
considerably less distinct, they seem less essential, and
above all they allow for more numerous and complex
intermediary gradations.

This division is much less evident in ordinary life;
for there it rarely happens that a man loses himself.
A man is normally not alone, and in his rise or fall is
tied to the destinies of his neighbours; so that it is
exceptional for anyone to acquire unlimited power, or
to fall by a succession of defeats into utter ruin.
Moreover, everyone is normally in possession of such
spiritual, physical and even financial resources that the
probabilities of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the
face of life, are relatively small. And one must take
into account a definite cushioning effect exercised both
by the law, and by the moral sense which constitutes
a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more
civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws
hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a
powerful one too powerful.

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But in the Lager things are different: here the
struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone
is desperately and ferociously alone. If some Null
Achtzehn vacillates, he will find no one to extend a
helping hand; on the contrary, someone will knock him
aside, because it is in no one’s interest that there be one
more “mussulman” 1 dragging himself to work every
day; and if someone, by a miracle of savage patience
and cunning, finds a new method of avoiding the hardest
work, a new art which yields him an ounce of bread,
he will try to keep his method secret, and he will be
esteemed and respected for this, and will derive from
it an exclusive, personal benefit; he will become stronger
and so will be feared, and who is feared is, ipso facto,
a candidate for survival.

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse
a ferocious law which states: “to he that has, will be
given; to he that has not, will be taken away.” In the
Lager, where man is alone and where the struggle for
life is reduced to its primordial mechanism, this unjust
law is openly in force, is recognized by all. With the
adaptable, the strong and astute individuals, even the
leaders willingly keep contact, sometimes even friendly
contact, because they hope later to perhaps derive some
benefit. But with the mussulmans, the men in decay, it
is not even worth speaking, because one knows already
that they will complain and will speak about what they
used to eat at home. Even less worthwhile is it to make
friends with them, because they have no distinguished
acquaintances in camp, they do not gain any extra
rations, they do not work in profitable Kommandos and

1 This word “Muselmann,” I do not know why, was used by
the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those
doomed to selection.

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If This is a Man

they know no secret method of organizing. And in any
case, one knows that they are only here on a visit, that
in a few weeks nothing will remain of them but a
handful of ashes in some near-by field and a crossed-out
number on a register. Although engulfed and swept
along without rest by the innumerable crowd of those
similar to them, they suffer and drag themselves along
in an opaque intimate solitude, and in solitude they die
or disappear, without leaving a trace in anyone’s memory.

The result of this pitiless process of natural selection
could be read in the statistics of Lager population
movements. At Auschwitz, in 1944, of the old Jewish
prisoners (we will not speak of the others here, as their
condition was different), “kleine Nummerf low numbers
less than 150,000, only a few hundred had survived; not
one was an ordinary Haftling, vegetating in the ordinary
Kommandos, and subsisting on the normal ration. There
remained only the doctors, tailors, shoemakers, musicians,
cooks, young attractive homosexuals, friends or compat¬
riots of some authority in the camp; or they were
particularly pitiless, vigorous and inhuman individuals,
installed (following an investiture by the SS command,
which showed itself in such choices to possess satanic
knowledge of human beings) in the posts of Kapos,
Blockaltester, etc.; or finally, those who, without
fulfilling particular functions, had always succeeded
through their astuteness and energy in successfully
organizing, gaining in this way, besides material advan¬
tages and reputation, the indulgence and esteem of the
powerful people in the camp. Whosoever does not
know how to become an “Organisator,” “Kombinator,”
“Prominent” (the savage eloquence of these words!)
soon becomes a “musselman.” In life, a third way
exists, and is in fact the rule; it does not exist in the
concentration camp.

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The Drowned and the Saved

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to
carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the
ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the
camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could
one survive more than three months in this way. All the
mussulmans who finished in the gas chambers have the
same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed
the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down
to the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic
incapacity, or by misfortune, or through some banal
incident, they are overcome before they can adapt
themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin
to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of
laws and prohibitions until their body is already in
decay, and nothing can save them from selections or
from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their
number is endless; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned,
form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass,
continually renewed and always identical, of non-men
who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead
within them, already too empty to really suffer. One
hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their
death death, in the face of which they have no fear,
as they are too tired to understand.

They crowd my memory with their faceless presences,
and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one
image, I would choose this image which is familiar to
me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders
curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace
of a thought is to be seen.

If the drowned have no story, and single and broad
is the path to perdition, the paths to salvation are many,
difficult and improbable.

The most travelled road, as we have stated, is the
“ Prominenz .” “ Prominenten ” is the name for the camp

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If This is a Man

officials, from the Haftling-director (Lageraltester) to
the Kapos, the cooks, the nurses, the night-guards, even
to the hut-sweepers and to the Scheissminister and
Bademeister (superintendents of the latrines and showers).
We are more particularly interested in the Jewish
prominents, because while the others are automatically
invested with offices as they enter the camp in virtue
of their natural supremacy, the Jews have to plot and
struggle hard to gain them.

The Jewish prominents form a sad and notable human
phenomenon. In them converge present, past and atavistic
sufferings, and the tradition of hostility towards the
stranger makes of them monsters of asociality and
insensitivity.

They are the typical product of the structure of the
German Lager: if one offers a position of privilege to
a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in
exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their
comrades, there will certainly be someone who will
accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law
and will become untouchable; the more power that he is
given, the more he will be consequently hateful and
hated. When he is given the command of a group of
unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them,
he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand
that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged
more suitable, will take over his post. Moreover, his
capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the
oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on
the oppressed; and he will only be satisfied when he
has unloaded onto his underlings the injury received
from above.

We are aware that this is very distant from the
picture that is usually given of the oppressed who unite,
if not in resistance, at least in suffering. We do not

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The Drowned and the Saved

deny that this may be possible when oppression does not
pass a certain limit, or perhaps when the oppressor,
through inexperience or magnanimity, tolerates or favours
it. But we state that in our days, in all countries in
which a foreign people have set foot as invaders, an
analogous position of rivalry and hatred among the
subjected has been brought about; and this, like many
other human characteristics, could be experienced in the
Lager in the light of particularly cruel evidence.

About the non-Jewish prominents there is less to say,
although they were far and away the most numerous
(no “Aryan” Haftling was without a post, however
modest). That they were stolid and bestial is natural
when one thinks that the majority were ordinary
criminals, chosen from the German prisons for the very
purpose of their employment as superintendents of the
camps for Jews; and we maintain that it was a very
apt choice, because we refuse to believe that the squalid
human specimens whom we saw at work were an average
example, not of Germans in general, but even of German
prisoners in particular. It is difficult to explain how in
Auschwitz the political German, Polish and Russian
prominents rivalled the ordinary convicts in brutality.
But it is known that in Germany the qualification of
political crime also applied to such acts as clandestine
trade, illicit relations with Jewish women, theft from
Party officials. The “real” politicals lived and died in
other camps, with names now sadly famous, in notoriously
hard conditions, which, however, in many aspects differed
from those described here.

But besides the officials in the strict sense of the
word, there is a vast category of prisoners, not initially
favoured by fate, who fight merely with their own
strength to survive. One has to fight against the
current; to battle every day and every hour against

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If This is a Man

exhaustion, hunger, cold and the resulting inertia; to
resist enemies and have no pity for rivals; to sharpen
one’s wits, build up one’s patience, strengthen one’s
will-power. Or else, to throttle all dignity and kill all
conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast
agains other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those
unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain families
and individuals in cruel times. Many were the ways
devised and put into effect by us in order not to die:
as many as there are different human characters. All
implied a weakening struggle of one against all,
and a by no means small sum of aberrations and
compromises. Survival without renunciation of any part
of one’s own moral world — apart from powerful and
direct interventions by fortune — was conceded only to
very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of
martyrs and saints.

We will try to show in how many ways it was
possible to reach salvation with the stories of Schepschel,
Alfred L., Elias and Henri.

Schepschel has been living in the Lager for four years.
He has seen the death of tens of thousands of those
like him, beginning with the pogrom which had driven
him from his village in Galicia. He had a wife and
five children and a prosperous business as a saddler, but
for a long time now he has grown accustomed to thinking
of himself only as a sack which needs periodic refilling.
Schepschel is not very robust, nor very courageous, nor
very wicked; he is not even particularly astute, nor has
he ever found a method which allows him a little
respite, but he is reduced to small and occasional
expedients, “ kombinac]e ” as they are called here.

Every now and again he steals a broom in Buna and
sells it to the Blockaltester, when he manages to set

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The Drowned and the Saved

aside a little bread-capital, he hires the tools of the
cobbler in the Block, his compatriot, and works on his
own account for a few hours; he knows how to make
braces with interlaced electric wires. Sigi told me that
he has seen him during the midday interval singing and
dancing in front of the hut of the Slovak workers, who
sometimes reward him with the remainders of their soup.

This said, one would be inclined to think of
Schepschel with indulgent sympathy, as of a poor wretch
who retains only a humble and elementary desire to
live, and who bravely carries on his small struggle not
to give way. But Schepschel was no exception, and
when the opportunity showed itself, he did not hesitate
to have Moischl, his accomplice in a theft from the
kitchen, condemned to a flogging, in the mistaken hope
of gaining favour in the eyes of the Blockdltester
and furthering his candidature for the position of
Kesselwascher, “vat-washer.”

The story of engineer Alfred L. shows among other
things how vain is the myth of original equality among
men.

In his own country L. was the director of an extremely
important factory of chemical products, and his name
was (and is) well-known in industrial circles throughout
Europe. He was a robust man of about fifty; I do not
know how he had been arrested, but he entered the
camp like all others: naked, alone and unknown. When
I knew him he was very wasted away, but still showed
on his face the signs of a disciplined and methodical
energy; at that time, his privileges were limited to the
daily cleaning of the Polish workers’ pots; this work,
which he had gained in some manner as his exclusive
monopoly, yielded him half a ladleful of soup per day.
Certainly it was not enough to satisfy his hunger;

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If This is a Man

nevertheless, no one had ever heard him complain. In
fact, the few words that he let slip implied imposing
secret resources, a solid and fruitful “organization.”

This was confirmed by his appearence. L. had a
“line”: with his hands and face always perfectly clean, he
had the rare self-denial to wash his shirt every fortnight,
without waiting for the bi-monthly change (we would
like to point out here that to wash a shirt meant finding
soap, time and space in the overcrowded washroom;
adapting oneself to carefully keep watch on the wet
shirt without losing attention for a moment, and to put
it on, naturally still wet, in the silence-hour when the
lights are turned out); he owned a pair of wooden
shoes to go to the shower, and even his striped suit
was singularly adapted to his appearance, clean and new.
L. had acquired in practice the whole appearance of a
prominent considerably before becoming one; only a
long time after did I find out that L. was able to earn
all this show of prosperity with incredible tenacity,
paying for his individual acquisitions and services with
bread from his own ration, so imposing upon himself
a regime of supplementary privations.

His plan was a long-term one, which is all the more
notable as conceived in an environment dominated by a
mentality of the provisional; and L. carried it out with
rigid inner discipline, without pity for himself or — with
greater reason — for comrades who crossed his path.
L. knew that the step was short from being judged
powerful to effectively becoming so, and that everywhere,
and especially in the midst of the general levelling of
the Lager, a respectable appearance is the best guarantee
of being respected. He took every care not to be
confused with the mass; he worked with stubborn duty,
even occasionally admonishing his lazy comrades in a
persuasive and deprecatory tone of voice; he avoided

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The Drowned and the Saved

the daily struggle for the best place in the queue for
the ration, and prepared to take the first ration,
notoriously the most liquid, every day, so as to be noticed
by his Blockdltester for his discipline. To complete
the separation, he always behaved in his relations with
his comrades with the maximum courtesy compatible
with his egotism, which was absolute.

When the Chemical Kommando was formed, as will
be described, L. knew that his hour had struck: he
needed no more than his spruce suit and his emaciated
and shaved face in the midst of the flock of his sordid
and slovenly colleagues to at once convince both Kapo
and Arbeitsdienst that he was one of the genuinely
saved, a potential prominent; so that (to he who has,
shall be given) he was without hesitation appointed
“specialist,” nominated technical head of the Kommando,
and taken on by the Direction of the Buna as analyst
in the laboratory of the styrene department. He was
subsequently appointed to examine all the new intake
to the Chemical Kommando, to judge their professional
ability; which he always did with extreme severity,
especially when faced with those in whom he smelled
possible future rivals.

I do not know how his story continued; but I feel
it is quite probable that he managed to escape death,
and today is still living his cold life of the determined
and joyless dominator.

Elias Lindzin, 141565, one day rained into the
Chemical Kommando. He was a dwarf, not more than
five feet high, but I have never seen muscles like his.
When he is naked you can see every muscle taut under
his skin, like a poised animal; his body, enlarged
without alteration of proportions, would serve as a good
model for a Hercules: but you must not look at his head.

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If This is a Man

Under his scalp, the skull sutures stand out immoder¬
ately. The cranium is massive and gives the impression
of being made of metal or stone; the back limit of his
shaven hair shows up barely a finger’s width above his
eyebrows. The nose, the chin, the forehead, the
cheekbones are hard and compact, the whole face looks
like a battering ram, an instrument made for butting.
A sense of bestial vigour emanates from his body.

To see Elias work is a disconcerting spectacle; the
Polish Meister, even the Germans sometimes stop to
admire Elias at work. Nothing seems impossible to him.
While we barely carry one sack of cement, Elias carries
two, then three, then four, keeping them balanced no one
knows how, and while he hurries along on his short,
squat legs, he makes faces under the load, he laughs,
curses, shouts and sings without pause, as if he had
lungs made of bronze. Despite his wooden shoes Elias
climbs like a monkey on to the scaffolding and runs
safely on cross-beams poised over nothing; he carries
six bricks at a time balanced on his head; he knows
how to make a spoon from a piece of tin, and a knife
from a scrap of steel; he finds dry paper, wood and
coal everywhere and knows how to start a fire in a few
moments even in the rain. He is a tailor, a carpenter,
a cobbler, a barber; he can spit incredible distances; he
sings, in a not unpleasant bass voice, Polish and Yiddish
songs never heard before; he can ingest ten, fifteen,
twenty pints of soup without vomiting and without
having diarrhoea, and begin work again immediately
after. He knows how to make a big hump come
out between his shoulders, and goes around the hut,
bow-legged and mimicking, shouting and declaiming
incomprehensibly, to the joy of the Prominents of
the camp. I saw him fight a Pole a whole head taller
than him and knock him down with a blow of his

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The Drowned and the Saved

cranium into the stomach, as powerful and accurate as a
catapult. I never saw him rest, I never saw him quiet
or still, I never saw him injured or ill.

Of his life as a free man, no one knows anything;
and in any case, to imagine Elias as a free man requires
a great effort of fantasy and induction; he only speaks
Yiddish, and the surly and deformed Yiddish of Warsaw;
besides it is impossible to keep him to a coherent
conversation. He might be twenty or forty years old;
he usually says that he is thirty three, and that he has
begot seventeen children — which is not unlikely. He
talks continuously on the most varied of subjects; always
in a resounding voice, in an oratorical manner, with
the violent mimicry of the deranged; as if he was
always talking to a dense crowd — and, as is natural,
he never lacks a public. Those who understand his
language drink up his declamations, shaking with
laughter; they pat him enthusiastically on the back
— a back as hard as iron — inciting him to continue;
while he, fierce and frowning, whirls around like a wild
animal in the circle of his audience, apostrophizing now
one, now another of them; he suddenly grabs hold of
one by the chest with his small hooked paw, irresistibly
drags him to himself, vomits into his face an incom¬
prehensible invective, then throws him back like a piece
of wood, and amidst the applause and laughter, with
his arms reaching up to the heavens like some little
prophetic monster, continues his raging and crazy speech.

His fame as an-exceptional worker spread quite soon,
and by the absurd law of the Lager, from then on he
practically ceased to work. His help was requested
directly by the Meister only for such work as required
skill and special vigour. Apart from these services he
insolently and violently supervized our daily, flat
exhaustion, frequently disappearing on mysterious visits

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If This is a Man

and adventures in who knows what recesses of the yard,
from which he returned with large bulges in his pockets
and often with his stomach visibly full.

Elias is naturally and innocently a thief: in this he
shows the instinctive astuteness of wild animals. He is
never caught in the act because he only steals when there
is a good chance; but when this chance comes Elias
steals as fatally and foreseeably as a stone drops. Apart
from the fact that it is difficult to surprise him, it is
obvious that it would be of no use punishing him for
his thefts: to him they imply a vital act like breathing
or sleeping.

We can now ask who is this man Elias. If he is a
madman, incomprehensible and para-human, who ended
in the Lager by chance. If he is an atavism, different from
our modern world, and better adapted to the primordial
conditions of camp life. Or if he is perhaps a product
of the camp itself, what we will all become if we do
not die in the camp, and if the camp itself does not
end first.

There is some truth in all three suppositions. Elias
has survived the destruction from outside, because he is
physically indestructable; he has resisted the annihilation
from within because he is insane. So, in the first place,
he is a surviver: he is the most adaptable, the human
type most suited to this way of living.

If Elias regains his liberty he will be confined to the
fringes of human society, in a prison or a lunatic asylum.
But here in Lager there are no criminals nor madmen;
no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene,
no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will,
as our every action is, in time and place, the only
conceivable one.

In the Lager Elias prospers and is triumphant. He is
a good worker and a good organizer, and for this

112

The Drowned and the Saved

double reason, he is safe from selections and respected
by both leaders and comrades. For those who have no
sound inner resources, for those who do not know how
to draw from their own consciences sufficient force to
cling to life, the only road to salvation leads to Elias:
to insanity and to deceitful bestiality. All the other
roads are dead-ends.

This said, one might perhaps be tempted to draw
conclusions, and perhaps even rules for our daily life.
Are there not all around us some Eliases, more or less
in embryo? Do we not see individuals living without
purpose, lacking all forms of self-control and conscience,
who live not in spite of these defects, but like Elias
precisely because of them?

The question is serious, but will not be further
discussed as we want these to be stories of the Lager,
while much has already been written on man outside the
Lager. But one thing we would still like to add: Elias,
as far as we could judge from outside, and as far as
the phrase can have meaning, was probably a happy
person.

Henri, on the other hand, is eminently civilized and
sane, and possesses a complete and organic theory on
the ways to survive in Lager. He is only twenty-two,
he is extremely intelligent, speaks French, German,
English and Russian, has an excellent scientific and
classical culture.

His brother died in Buna last winter, and since then
Henri has cut off every tie of affection; he has closed
himself up, as if in armour, and fights to live without
distraction with all the resources that he can derive
from his quick intellect and his refined education.
According to Henri’s theory, there are three methods
open to man to escape extermination which still allow

113

If This is a Man

him to retain the name of man: organization, pity and
theft.

He himself practises all three. There is no better
strategist than Henri in seducing (“cultivating” he says)
the English PoWs. In his hands they become real geese
with golden eggs — if you remember that in exchange
for a single English cigarette you can make enough in
Lager not to starve for a day. Henri was once seen in
the act of eating a real hard-boiled egg.

The traffic in products of English origin is Henri’s
monopoly, and this is all a matter of organization; but
his instrument of penetration, with the English and with
others, is pity. Henri has the delicate and subtly perverse
body and face of Sodoma’s San Sebastian: his eyes are
deep and profound, he has no beard yet, he moves with
a natural languid elegance (although when necessary
he knows how to run and jump like a cat, while the
capacity of his stomach is little inferior to that of Elias).
Henri is perfectly aware of his natural gifts and exploits
them with the cold competence of a physicist using a
scientific instrument: the results are surprising . Basically
it is a question of a discovery: Henri has discovered
that pity, being a primary and instinctive sentiment,
grows quite well if ably cultivated, particularly in the
primitive minds of the brutes who command us, those
very brutes who have no scruples about beating us up
without a reason, or treading our faces into the ground;
nor has the great practical importance of the discovery
escaped him, and upon it he has built up his personal
trade.

As the ichneumon paralyses the great hairy caterp¬
illar, wounding it in its only vulnerable ganglion,
so Henri at a glance sizes up the subject, “son type he
speaks to him briefly, to each with the appropriate
language, and the “ type ” is conquered: he listens with

114

The Drowned and the Soved

increasing sympathy, he is moved by the fate of this
unfortunate young man, and not much time is needed
before he begins to yield returns.

There is no heart so hardened that Henri cannot breach
it if he sets himself to it seriously. In the Lager, and
in Buna as well, his protectors are very numerous: English
soldiers, French Ukrainian, Polish civilian workers;
German “politicals”; at least four Blockdltester, a cook,
even an SS man. But his favourite field is Ka-Be: Henri
has free entry into Ka-Be; doctor Citron and doctor Weiss
are more than his protectors, they are his friends and
take him in whenever he wants and with the diagnosis
he wants. This takes place especially immediately before
selections, and in the periods of the most laborious
work: “hibernation,” as he says.

Possessing such conspicuous friendships, it is natural
that Henri is rarely reduced to the third method, theft;
on the other hand, he naturally does not talk much
about this subject.

It is very pleasant to talk to Henri in moments of
rest. It is also useful: there is nothing in the camp that
he does not know and about which he has not reasoned
in his close and coherent manner. Of his conquests, he
speaks with educated modesty, as of prey of little worth,
but he digresses willingly into an explanation of the
calculation which led him to approach Hans asking him
about his son at the front, and Otto instead showing
him the scars on his shins.

To speak with Henri is useful and pleasant: one
sometimes also feels him warm and near; communica¬
tion, even affection seems possible. One seems to
glimpse, behind his uncommon personality, a human
soul, sorrowful and aware of itself. But the next
moment his sad smile freezes into a cold grimace which
seems studied at the mirror; Henri politely excuses

11 &

If This is a Man

himself (“... j’ai quelque chose d faire,” “... j’ai quelqu’un
d voir”) and here he is again, intent on his hunt and
his struggle; hard and distant, enclosed in armour, the
enemy of all, inhumanly cunning and incomprehensible
like the Serpent in Genesis.

,' From all my talks with Henri, even the most cordial,
I have always left with a slight taste of defeat; of also
having been, somehow inadvertently, not a man to him,
but an instrument in his hands.

I know that Henri is living today. I would give
much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want
to see him again.

116

Chemical Examination

Kommando 98, called the Chemical Kommando,
should have been a squad of skilled workers.

The day on which its formation was officially
announced a meagre group of fifteen Haftlinge gathered
in the grey of dawn around the new Kapo in the
roll-call squarre.

This was the first disillusion: he was a “green
triangle,” a professional delinquent, the Arbeitsdienst
had not thought is necessary for the Kapo of the Chemical
Kommando to be a chemist. It was pointless wasting
one’s breath asking him questions; he would not have
replied, or else he would have replied with kicks and
shouts. On the other hand, his not very robust appearance
and his smaller than average stature were reassuring.

He made a short speech in the foul German of the
barracks, and the disillusion was confirmed. So these
were the chemists: well, he was Alex, and if they thought
they were entering paradise, they were mistaken. In the
first place, until the day production began, Kommando
98 would be no more than an ordinary transport-
Kommando attached to the magnesium chloride warei-

117

If This is a Man

house. Secondly, if they imagined, being Intelligenten,
intellectuals, that they could make a fool of him, Alex,
a Reichsdeutscher, well, Herrgottsacrament, he would
show them, he would... (and with his fist clenched and
index finger extended he cut across the air with the
menacing gesture of the Germans); and finally, they
should not imagine that they would fool anyone, if they
had applied for the position without any qualifications —
an examination, yes gentlemen, in the very near future;
a chemistry examination, before the triumvirate of the
Polymerization Department: Doktor Hagen, Doktor
Probst, and Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz.

And with this, meine Herren, enough time had been
lost, Kommandos 96 and 97 had already started, forward
march, and to begin with, whosoever failed to walk in
line and step would have to deal with him.

He was a Kapo like all the other Kapos.

Leaving the camp, in front of the musical band and
the SS counting-post we march in rows of five, beret
in hand, arms hanging down our sides and neck rigid;
speaking is forbidden. Then we change to threes and
it is possible to exchange a few words amidst the clatter
of then thousand pairs of wooden shoes.

Who are my new comrades? Next to me walks
Alberto; he is in his third year at university, and once
again we have managed to stay together. The third
person on my left I have never seen; he seems very
young, is as pale as wax, and has the number of the
Dutch. The three backs in front of me are also new.
It is dangerous to turn around, I might lose step or
stumble; but I try for a moment, and see the face of
Iss Clausner.

So long as one walks there is no time to think, one
has to take care not to step on the shoes of the fellow

118

Chemical Examination

hobbling in front, and not let them be stepped on by the
fellow behind; every now and again there is a hole to
be walked over, an oily puddle to be avoided. I know
where we are, I have already come here with my preceding
Kommando, it is the H-Strasse, the road of the stores,
I tell Alberto, we are really going to the magnesium
chloride warehouse, at least that was not a lie.

We have arrived, we climb down into a large damp
cellar, full of draughts; this is the headquarters of the
Kommando, the Bude as it is called here. The Kapo
divides us into three squads: four to unload the sacks
from the wagon, seven to carry them down, four to
pile them up in the deposit. We form the last squad,
I, Alberto, Iss and the Dutchman.

At last we can speak, and to each one of us what
Alex said seems a madman’s dream.

With these empty faces of ours, with these sheared
craniums, with these shameful clothes, to take a chemical
examination. And obviously it will be in German; and
we will have to go in front of some blond Aryan
doctor hoping that we do not have to blow our noses,
because perhaps he will not know that we do not have
handkerchiefs, and it will certainly not be possible to
explain it to him. And we will have our old comrade
hunger with us, and we will hardly be able to stand still
on our feet, and he will certainly smell our odour, to
which we are by now accustomed, but which persecuted
us during the first days, the odour of turnips and cabbages,
raw, cooked and digested.

Exactly so, Clausner confirms. But have the Germans
such great need of chemists? Or is it a new trick, a new
machine “pour faire chier les Juifs?” Are they aware of
the grotesque and absurd test asked of us, of us who
are no longer alive, of us who have already gone half¬
crazy in the dreary expectation of nothing?

119

If This is a Man

Clausner shows me the bottom of his bowl. Where
others have carved their numbers, and Alberto and I our
names, Clausner has written: u Ne pas chercher a com-
prendre .”

Although we do not think for more than a few
minutes a day, and then in a strangely detached and
external manner, we well know that we will end in
selections. I know that I am not made of the stuff of
those who resist, I am too civilized, I still think too
much, I use myself up at work. And now I also know
that I can save myself if I become a Specialist, and
that I will become a Specialist if I pass a chemistry
examination.

Today, at this very moment as I sit writing at a
table, I myself am not convinced that these things really
happened.

Three days passed, three of those usual immemorable
days, so long while they are passing, and so short
afterwards, and we were already all tired of believing in
the chemistry examination.

The Kommando was reduced to twelve men: three
had disappeared in the customary manner of down there,
perhaps into the hut next door, perhaps cancelled from
this world. Of the twelve, five were not chemists; all
five had immediately requested permission from Alex
to return to their former Kommandos. They were given
a few kicks, but unexpectedly, and by who knows whose
authority, it was decided that they should remain as
auxiliaries to the Chemical Kommando.

Down came Alex into the magnesium chloride yard
and called us seven out to go and face the examination.
We go like seven awkward chicks behind the hen,
following Alex up the steps of the Polimerisations-
Biiro. We are in the lobby, there is a brass-plate on

120

Chemical Examination

the door with the three famous names. Alex knocks
respectfully, takes off his beret and enters. We can hear
a quiet voice; Alex comes out again. “ Ruhe, jetzt.
Warten," wait in silence.

We are satisfied with this. When one waits time
moves smoothly without need to intervene and drive it
forward, while when one works, every minute moves
painfully and has to be laboriously driven away. We
are always happy to wait; we are capable of waiting for
hours with the complete obtuse inertia of spiders in old
webs.

Alex is nervous, he walks up and down and we move
out of his way each time. We too, each in our own way,
are uneasy; only Mendi is not. Mendi is a rabbi; he
comes from sub-Carpathian Russia, from that confusion of
peoples where everyone speaks at least three languages,
and Mendi speaks seven. He knows a great number
of things; besides being a rabbi, he is a militant Zionist,
a comparative philologist, he has been a partisan and a
lawyer; he is not a chemist, but he wants to try all the
same, he is a stubborn, courageous keen little man.

Balia has a pencil and we all crowd around him.
We are not sure if we still know how to write, we want
to try.

Koblenivasserstoffe, Massenwirkungsgesetz. The Ger¬
man names of compounds and laws float back into my
memory. I feel grateful towards my brain: I have not
paid much attention to it, but it still serves me so well.

Here is Alex. I am a chemist. What have I to do
with this man Alex? He plants his feet in front of me,
he roughly adjusts the collar of my jacket, he takes out
my beret and slaps it on my head, then he steps backwards,
eyes the result with a disgusted air, and turns his back,
muttering: “Was fiir ein Muselmann Zugang.” What a
messy recruit!

121

If This is a Man

The door opens. The three doctors have decided that
six candidates will be examined in the morning. The
seventh will not. I am the seventh, I have the highest
entry number, I have to return to work. Alex will only
come to fetch me in the afternoon. What ill-luck, I
cannot even talk to the others to hear what questions
they are asking.

This time it really is my turn. Alex looks at me
blackly on the doorstep; he feels himself in some way
responsible for my miserable appearance. He dislikes
me because I am Italian, because I am Jewish and because,
of all of us, I am the one furthest from his sergeants’
mess ideal of virility. By analogy, without understanding
anything, and proud of this very ignorance, he shows a
profound disbelief in my chances for the examination.

We have entered. There is only Doktor Pannwitz;
Alex, beret in hand, speaks to him in an undertone:
“ ...an Italian, has been here only three months, already
half kaputt... Er sagt er ist Chemiker ...” But he, Alex,
apparently has his reservations on the subject.

Alex is briefly dismissed and put aside, and I feel like
Oedipus in front of the Sphinx. My ideas are clear, and
I am aware even at this moment that the position at
stake is important; yet I feel a mad desire to disappear,
not to take the test.

Pannwitz is tall, thin, blond; he has eyes, hair, and
nose as all Germans ought to have them, and sits
formidably behind a complicated writing-table. I, Hiiftling
174517, stand in his office, which is a real office, shining,
clean and ordered, and I feel that I would leave a dirty
stain whatever I touched.

When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and
looked at me.

From that day I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz
many times and in many ways. I have asked myself

122

Chemical Examination

how he really functioned as a man; how he filled his time,
outside of the Polymerization and the Indo-Germanic
conscience; above all when I was once more a free man,
I wanted to meet him again, not from a spirit of revenge,
but merely from a personal curiosity about the human soul.

Because that look was not one between two men; and
if I had known how completely to explain the nature
of that look, which came as if across the glass window
of an acquarium between two beings who live in different
worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the
great insanity of the third Germany.

One felt in that moment, in an immediate manner,
what we all thought and said of the Germans. The
brain which governed those blue eyes and those manicured
hands said: “This something in front of me belongs to
a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress.
In this particular case, one has to first make sure that
it does not contain some utilizable element.” And in my
head, like seeds in an empty pumpkin: “Blue eyes and
fair hair are essentially wicked. No communication
possible. I am a specialist in mine chemistry. I am a
specialist in organic syntheses. I am a specialist... ”.

And the interrogation began, while in the corner that
third zoological specimen, Alex, yawned and chewed
noisily.

“Wo sind Sie gehoren?” He addresses me as Sie, the
polite form of address: Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz has
no sense of humour. Curse him, he is not making the
slightest effort to speak a slightly more comprehensible
German.

I took my degree at Turin in 1941, summa cum
laude — and while I say it I have the definite sensation
of not being believed, of not even believing it myself;
it is enough to look at my dirty hands covered with sores,
my convict’s trousers encrusted with mud. Yet I am he,

123

If This is a Man

the B. Sc. of Turin, in fact, at this particular moment
it is impossible to doubt my identity with him, as my
reservoir of knowledge of organic chemistry, even after
so long an inertia, responds at request with unexpected
docility. And even more, this sense of lucid elation, this
excitement which I feel warm in my veins, I recognize
it, it is the fever of examinations, my fever of my
examinations, that spontaneous mobilization of all my
logical faculties and all my knowledge, which my friends
at university so envied me.

The examination is going well. As I gradually realize
it, I seem to grow in stature. He is asking me now on
what subject I wrote my degree thesis. I have to make
a violent effort to recall that sequence of memories, so
deeply buried away: it is as if I was trying to remember
the events of a previous incarnation.

Something protects me. My poor old “Measurements
of dielectrical constants” are of particular interest to this
blond Aryan who lives so safely: he asks me if I know
English, he shows me Gatterman’s book, and even this
is absurd and impossible, that down here, on the other
side of the barbed wire, a Gatterman should exist, exactly
similar to the one I studied in Italy in my fourth year,
at home.

Now it is over: the excitement which sustained me
for the whole of the test suddenly gives way and, dull
and flat, I stare at the fair skin of his hand writing down
my fate on the white page in incomprehensible symbols.

“Los, ab!” Alex enters the scene again, I am once
more under his jurisdiction. He saluted Pannwitz,
clicking his heels, and in return receives a faint nod of
the eyelids. For a moment I grope around for a suitable
formula of leave-taking: but in vain. I know how to
say to eat, to work, to steal, to die in German; I also
know how to say sulphuric acid, atmospheric pressure,

124

Chemical Examination

and short-wave generator, but I do not know how to
address a person of importance.

Here we are again on the steps. Alex flies down the
stairs: he has leather shoes because he is not a Jew, he
is as light on his feet as the devils of Malabolge. At
the bottom he turns and looks at me sourly as I walk
down hesitantly and noisily in my two enormous unpaired
wooden shoes, clinging on to the rail like an old man.

It seems to have gone well, but I would be crazy to rely
on it. I already know the Lager well enough to realize
that one should never anticipate, especially optimistically.
What is certain is that I have spent a day without
working, so that tonight I will have a little less hunger,
and this is a concrete advantage, not to be taken away.

To re-enter Bude, one has to cross a space cluttered
up with piles of cross-beams and metal frames. The steel
cable of a crane cuts across the road, and Alex catches
hold of it to climb over: Donnerwetter, he looks at his
hand black with thick grease. In the meanwhile I have
joined him. Without hatred and without sneering, Alex
wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the
back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the
poor brute Alex, if someone told him that today, on the
basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and the
innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz
and everywhere.

125

The Canto of Ulysses

There were six of us, scraping and cleaning the inside
of an underground petrol tank; the daylight only reached
us through a small manhole. It was a luxury job because
no one supervized us; but it was cold and damp. The
powder of the rust burnt under our eyelids and coated
our throats and mouths with a taste almost like blood.

The rope-ladder hanging from the manhole began to
sway: someone was coming. Deutsch extinguished his
cigarette, Goldner woke Sivadjan; we all began to
vigorously scrape the resonant steelplate wall.

It was not the Vorarbeiter, it was only Jean, the
Pikolo of our Kommando. Jean was an Alsatian student;
although he was already twenty four, he was the youngest
Haftling of the Chemical Kommando. So that he was
given the post of Pikolo, which meant the messenger-
clerk, responsible for the cleaning of the hut, for the
distribution of tools, for the washing of bowls, and for
keeping record of the working hours of the Kommando.

Jean spoke French and German fluently: as soon as
we recognized his shoes on the top step of the ladder
we all stopped scraping.

127

If This is a Man

“ Also, Pikolo, was giht es Neues?''

“ Qu’est ce qu’il-y-a comme soupe aujourd’hui?”

...in what mood was the Kapo? And the affair of the
twenty five lashes given to Stern? What was the weather
like outside? Had he read the newspaper? What smell
was coming from the civilian kitchen? What was the
time?

Jean was liked a great deal by the Kommando. One
must realize that the post of Pikolo represented a quite
high rank in the hierarchy of the Prominents: the Pikolo
(who is usually no more than seventeen years old) does
no manual work, has an absolute right to the remainder
of the daily ration to be found on the bottom of the vat,
and can stay all day near the stove. He “therefore” has
the right to a supplementary half-ration and has a good
chance of becoming the friend and confidant of the Kapo,
from whom he officially receives discarded clothes and
shoes. Now Jean was an exceptional Pikolo. He was
shrewd and physically robust, and at the same time gentle
and friendly: although he continued his secret individual
struggle against the camp and against death, he did not
neglect his human relationships with less privileged
comrades; at the same time he had been so able and
persevering that he had managed to establish himself
in the confidence of Alex, the Kapo.

Alex had kept all his promises. He had shown himself
a violent and unreliable rogue, with an armour of solid
and compact ignorance and stupidity, always excepting
his intuition and consummate technique as convict-keeper.
He never let slip an opportunity of proclaiming his pride
in his pure blood and his green triangle, and displayed
a lofty contempt for his ragged and starving chemists:
u lhr Doktoren! lhr IntelligentenF he sneered every day,
watching them crowd around with their bowls held out
for the distribution of the ration. He was extremely

128

The Canto of Ulysses

compliant and servile before the civilian Meister and with
the SS he kept up ties of cordial friendship.

He was clearly intimidated by the register of the
Kommando and by the daily report of work, and this
had been the path that Pikolo had chosen to make
himself indispensable. It had been a long, cautious and
subtle task which the entire Kommando had followed
for a month with bated breath; but at the end the
porcupine’s defence was penetrated, and Pikolo confirmed
in his office to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Although Jean had never abused his position, we had
already been able to verify that a single word of his, said
in the right tone of voice and at the right moment, had
great power; many times already it had saved one of us
from a whipping or from being denounced to the SS.
We had been friends for a week: we discovered each
other during the unusual occasion of an air-raid alarm,
but then, swept by the fierce rhythm of the Lager, we had
only been able to greet each other fleetingly, at the
latrines, in the washroom.

Hanging with one hand on the swaying ladder, he
pointed to me: “ Aujourd’hui c’est Primo qui viendra avec
moi chercher la soupe

Until yesterday it had been Stern, the squinting
Transylvanian; now he had fallen into disgrace for some
story of brooms stolen from the store, and Pikolo had
managed to support my candidature as assistant to the
“Essenholen the daily corvee of the ration.

He climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the
brightness of the day. It was warmish outside, the sun
drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the greasy earth,
which made me think of a holiday beach of my infancy.
Pikolo gave me one of the two wooden poles, and we
walked along under a clear June sky.

129

If This is a Man

I began to thank him, but he stopped me: it was not
necessary. One could see the Carpathians covered in
snow. I breathed in the fresh air, I felt unusually light¬
hearted.

“Tu es fou de marcher si vite. On a le temps, tu
sais .” The ration was collected half a mile away; one
had to return with the pot weighing over a hundred
pounds sopported on the two poles. It was quite a tiring
task, but it meant a pleasant walk there without a load,
and the ever-welcome chance of going near the kitchens.

We slowed down. Pikolo was expert. He had chosen
the path cleverly so that we would have to make a long
detour, walking at least for an hour, without arousing
suspicion. We spoke of our houses, of Strasbourg and
Turin, of the books we had read, of what we had studied,
of our mothers: how all mothers resemble each other!
His mother too had scolded him for never knowing how
much money he had in his pocket; his mother too would
have been amazed if she had known that he had found
his feet, that day by day he was finding his feet.

An SS man passed on a bicycle. It is Rudi, the
Blockfuhrer. Halt! Attention! Take off your beret! "Sale
brute, celui-la. Ein ganz gemeiner Hund.” Can he speak
French and German with equal facility? Yes, he thinks
indifferently in both languages. He spent a month in
Liguria, he likes Italy, he would like to learn Italian.
I would be pleased to teach him Italian: why not try?
We can do it. Why not immediately, one thing is as
good as another, the important thing is not to lose time,
not to waste this hour.

Limentani from Rome walks by, dragging his feet,
with a bowl hidden under his jacket. Pikolo listens
carefully, picks up a few words of our conversation and
repeats them smiling: “ Zup-pa, cam-po, acqua

130

The Canto of Ulysses

Frenkl the spy passes. Quicken our pace, one never
knows, he does evil for evil’s sake.

... The canto of Ulysses. Who knows how or why
it comes into my mind. But we have no time to change,
this hour is already less than an hour. If Jean is
intelligent he will understand. He will understand —
today I feel capable of so much.

...Who is Dante? What is the Comedy? That curious
sensation of novelty which one feels if one tries to explain
briefly what is the Divine Comedy. How the Inferno is
divided up, what are its punishments. Virgil is Reason,
Beatrice is Theology.

Jean pays great attention, and I begin slowly and
accurately:

“Then of that age-old fire the loftier horn
Began to mutter and move, as a wavering flame
Wrestles against the wind and is over-worn;

And, like a speaking tongue vibrant to frame
Language, the tip of it flickering to and fro
Threw out a voice and answered: ‘When I came...’ ”

Here I stop and try to translate. Disastrous — poor
Dante and poor French! All the same, the experience
seems to promise well: Jean admires the bizarre simile
of the tongue and suggests the appropriate word to
translate “age-old.”

And after “When I came?” Nothing. A hole in my
memory. “Before Aeneas ever named it so.” Another
hole. A fragment floats into my mind, not relevant:
“...nor piety To my old father, nor the wedded love That
should have comforted Penelope...,” is it correct?

“...So on the open sea I set forth.”

Of this I am certain, I am sure, I can explain it to

131

If This is a Man

Pikolo, I can point out why “I set forth” 1 is not “je me
mis," it is much stronger and more audacious, it is a
chain which has been broken, it is throwing oneself on
the other side of a barrier, we know the impulse well.
The open sea: Pikolo has travelled by sea, and knows
what it means: it is when the horizon closes in on itself,
free, straight ahead and simple, and there is nothing
but the smell of the sea; sweet things, ferociously far
away.

We have arrived at Kraftwerk, where the cable-laying
Kommando works. Engineer Levi must be here. Here
he is, one can only see his head above the trench. He
waves to me, he is a brave man, I have never seen his
morale low, he never speaks of eating.

“Open sea,” “open sea.” I know it rhymes with “left
me”: "... and that small band of comrades that had never
left me,” but I cannot remember if it comes before or
after. And the journey as well, the foolhardy journey
beyond the Pillars of Hercules, how sad, I have to tell it in
prose — a sacrelegi. I have only rescued two lines, but
they are worth stopping for:

“...that none should prove so hardy
To venture the uncharted distances...”

“to venture” 2 : I had to come to the Lager to realize that
it is the same expression as before “I set forth.” But
I say nothing to Jean, I am not sure that it is an
important observation. How many things there are to
say, and the sun is already high, midday is near. I am
in a hurry, a terrible hurry.

Here, listen Pikolo, open your ears and your mind,
you have to understand, for my sake:

1 “misi me” [Translator’s note],

2 “si metta” [Translator’s note].

132

The Canto of Ulysses

“Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,

To follow after knowledge and excellence.”

As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the
blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment
I forget who I am and where I am.

Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is,
he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is
something more: perhaps, despite the wan translation
and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received
the message, he has felt that it has to do with him, that
it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in
particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare
to reason of these things with the poles for the soup
on our shoulders.

“My little speech made every one so keen...”
...and I try, but in vain, to explain how many things
this “keen” means. There is another lacuna here, this
time irreparable, “...the light kindles and grows Beneath
the moon” or something like it; but before it?... Not an
idea, “keine Ahnung ” as they say here. Forgive me,
Pikolo, I have forgotten at least four triplets.

“Qa ne fait rien, vas-y tout de meme."

“...When at last hove up a mountain, grey
With distance, and so lofty and so steep,

I never had seen the like on any day.”

Yes, yes, “so lofty and so steep,” not “very steep” \ a
consecutive proposition. And the mountains when one
sees them in the distance... the mountains... oh, Pikolo,
Pikolo, say something, speak, do not let me think of my
mountains which used to show up against the dusk of
evening as I returned by train from Milan to Turin!

1 “alta tan to”, not “molto alta” [translator’* note].

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If This is a Man

Enough, one must go on, these are things that one
thinks but does not say. Pikolo waits and looks at me.

I would give today’s soup to know how to connect
“the like on any day” to the last lines. I try to reconstruct
it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers
— but it is no use, the rest is silence. Other verses dance
in my head: “...The sodden ground belched wind...”,
no, it is something else. It is late, it is late, we have
reached the kitchen, I must finish:

“And three times round she went in roaring smother

With all the waters; at the fourth the poop

Rose, and the prow went down, as pleased Another.”

I keep Pikolo back, it is vitally necessary and urgent
that he listen, that he understand this “as pleased
Another” before it is too late; tomorrow he or I might
be dead, or we might never see each other again, I must
tell him, I must explain to him about the Middle Ages,
about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected
anachronism, but still more, something gigantic that I
myself have only just seen, in a flask of intuition, perhaps
the reason for our fate, for our being here today....

We are now in the soup queue, among the sordid,
ragged crowd of soup-carriers from other Kommandos.
Those just arrived press against our backs. “Kraut und
Ruben? Kraut und Ruben.” The official announcement
is made that the soup today is of cabbages and turnips:

“Choux et navets. Kaposzta es repak .”

“And over our heads the hollow seas closed up.”

134

The Events of the Summer

Throughout the spring, convoys arrived from
Hungary; one prisoner in two was Hungarian, and
Hungarian had become the second language in the camp
after Yiddish.

In the month of August 1944, we who had entered
the camp five months before now counted among the
old ones. As such, we of Kommando 98 were not
amazed that the promises made to us and the examination
we had passed had brought no result; neither amazed
nor exceptionally saddened. At bottom, we all had a
certain dread of changes: “When things change, they
change for the worse” was one of the proverbs of the
camp. More generally, experience had shown us many
times the vanity of every conjecture: why worry oneself
trying to read into the future when no action, no word
of ours could have the minimum influence? We were
old Haftlinge: our wisdom lay in “not trying to
understand,” not imagining the future, not tormenting
ourselves as to how and when it would all be over; not
asking others or ourselves any questions.

If This is a Man

We preserved the memories of our previous life, but
blurred and remote, profoundly sweet and sad, like
the memories of early infancy. While for everybody,
the moment of entry into the camp was the starting point
of a different sequence of thoughts, those near and
sharp, continually confirmed by present experience, like
wounds re-opened every day.

The news heard in the Buna yards of the allied
landing in Normandy, of the Russian offensive and of
the failed attempt against Hitler, had given rise to waves
of violent but ephemeral hope. Day by day everyone
felt his strength vanish, his desire to live melt away,
his mind grow dim; and Normandy and Russia were
so far away, and the winter so near; hunger and desolation
so concrete, anjl all the rest so unreal, that it did not
seem possible that there could really exist any other
world or time other than our world of mud and our
sterile and stagnant time, whose end we were by now
incapable of imagining.

For living men, the units of time always have a
value, which increases in ratio to the strength of the
internal resources of the person living through them;
but for us, hours, days, months spilled out sluggishly
from the future into the past, always too slowly, a
valueless and superfluous material, of which we sought
to rid ourselves as soon as possible. With the end
of the season when the days chased each other, vivacious,
precious and irrecoverable, the future stood in front of
us, grey and inarticulate, like an invincible barrier. For
us, history had stopped.

But in August ’44 the bombardments of Upper Silesia
began, and they continued with irregular pauses and
renewals throughout the summer and the autumn until
the definitive crisis.

136

The Events oj the Summer

The monstruously unanimous labour of gestation of
the Buna stopped brusquely, and at once degenerated
into a disconnected, frantic and paroxysmal confusion.
The day on which the production of synthetic rubber
should have begun, which seemed imminent in August,
was gradually postponed until the Germans no longer
spoke about it.

Constructive work stopped; the power of the countless
multitudes of slaves was directed elsewhere, and day by
day showed itself more riotous and passively hostile.
At every raid there was new damage to be repaired;
the delicate machinery assembled with care just before
had to be dismantled again and evacuated; air-raid
shelters and walls had to be hurriedly erected to show
themselves at the next test as ironically uneffective as
sand castles.

We had thought that anything would be preferable
to the monotony of the identical and inexorably long
days, to the systematic and ordered squalor of the Buna
at work; but we were forced to change our minds when
the Buna began to fall in pieces around us, as if struck
by a curse in which we ourselves felt involved. We had
to sweat amidst the dust and smoking ruins, and
tremble like beasts, flattened against the earth by the
anger of the aeroplanes; broken by exhaustion and
parched with thirst, we returned in the long, windy
evenings of the Polish summer to find the camp upside
down, no water to drink or wash in, no soup for
our empty bellies, no light by which to defend our
piece of bread against someone else’s hunger, or find
our shoes and clothes in the morning in the dark,
shrieking hole of the Block.

At Buna the German civilians raged with the fury
of the secure man who wakes up from a long dream
of domination and sees his own ruin and is unable to

137

If This is a Man

understand it. The Reichsdeutsche of the Lager as well,
politicals included, felt the ties of blood and soil in the
hour of danger. This new fact reduced the complications
of hatreds and incomprehensions to their elementary
terms and redivided the camp: the politicals, together
with the green triangles and the SS, saw, or thought
they saw, in all our faces the mochery of revenge and
the vicious joy of the vendetta. They found themselves
in unanimous agreement on this, and their ferocity
redoubled. No German could now forget that we were
on the other side: on the side of the terrible sowers
who furrowed the German sky as masters, high above
every defence, and twisted the living metal of their
constructions, carrying slaughter every day into their very
homes, into the hitherto unviolated homes of the German
people.

As for us, we were too destroyed to be really afraid.
The few who could still judge and feel rightly, drew
new strength and hope from the bombardments; those
whom hunger had not yet reduced to a definitive inertia
often profited from the moments of general panic to
undertake doubly rash expeditions (since, besides the
direct risk of the raid, theft carried out in conditions
of emergency was punished by hanging) to the factory
kitchens or the stores. But the greater number bore
the new danger and the new discomforts with unchanged
indifference: it was not a conscious resignation, but the
opaque torpor of beasts broken in by blows, whom the
blows no longer hurt.

Entry to the reinforced shelters was forbidden us.
When the earth began to tremble, we dragged ourselves,
stunned and limping, through the corrosive fumes of the
smoke bombs to the vast waste areas, sordid and sterile,
closed within the boundary of the Buna; there we lay
inert, piled up on top of each other like dead men,

138

The Events of the Summer

but still aware of the momentary pleasure of our bodies
resting. We looked with indifferent eyes at the smoke
and flames breaking out around us: in moments of quiet,
full of the distant menacing roar that every European
knows, we picked from the ground the stunted chicory
leaves and dandelions, trampled on a hundred times,
and chewed them slowly in silence.

When the alarm was over, we returned from all
parts to our posts, a silent innumerable flock, accustomed
to the anger of men and things; and continued that work
of ours, as hated as ever, now even more obviously
useless and senseless.

In this world shaken every day more deeply by the
omens of its nearing end, amidst new terrors and hopes,
with intervals of exasperated slavery, I happened to meet
Lorenzo.

The story of my relationship with Lorenzo is both
long and short, quiet and enigmatic: is is the story of
a time and condition now effaced from every present
reality, and so I do not think it can be understood except
in the manner in which we nowadays understand events
of legends or of the remotest history.

In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian
civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the
remainder of his ration every day for six months; he
gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard
on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all
this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because
he was good and simple and did not think that one
did good for a reward.

All this should not sound little. My case was not
the only one; as has already been said, there were
others of us who had contacts of various kinds with
civilians, and derived from them the means to survive;

139

If This is a Man

but they were relationships of a different nature. Our
comrades spoke of them in the same ambiguous manner,
full of overtones, in which men of the world speak of
their feminine relationships: that is, of adventures of
which one can justly be proud and for which one wants
to be envied, but which, even for the most pagan
consciences, always remain on the margins of the
permissible and the honest; so that it is incorrect and
improper to boast about them. It is in this way that
the Haftlinge speak of their civilian “protectors” and
“friends”; with an ostentatious discretion, without stating
names, so as not to compromise them, and especially
and above all so as not to create undesirable rivals.
The most consummate, the professional seducers like
Henri, do not in fact speak of them; they surround
their successes with an aura of equivocal mystery, and
they limit themselves to hints and allusions, calculated
to arouse in their audience a confused and disquieting
legend that they enjoy the good graces of boundlessly
powerful and generous civilians. This in view of a
deliberate aim: the reputation of good luck, as we have
said elsewhere, shows itself of fundamental utility to
whosoever knows how to surround himself by it.

The reputation of being a seducer, of being “orga¬
nized,” excites at the time envy, scorn, contempt and
admiration. Whoever allows himself to be seen eating
“organized” food is judged quite severely; he shows a
serious lack of modesty and tact, besides an open
stupidity. It would be equally stupid and impertinent
to ask “who gave it to you? where did you find it?
how did you manage it?” Only the High Numbers,
foolish, useless and helpless, who know nothing of the
rules of the Lager, ask such questions; one does not
reply to these questions, or one replies “ Verschwinde,
Mensch!,” u Hau’ ab “ Uciekaj“Schiess in den Wind?

140

The Events of the Summer

“Va chier ; in short, with one of those countless
equivalents of “Go to hell” in which camp jargon is
so rich.

There are also those who specialize in complex and
patient campaigns of spying to identify who is the
civilian or group of civilians to whom so-and-so turns,
and then try in various ways to supplant him. Intermin¬
able controversies of priority break out, made all the
more bitter for the loser by the knowledge that a
“tried” civilian is almost always more profitable, and
above all safer than a civilian making his first contact
with us. He is a civilian who is worth much more for
obvious sentimental and technical reasons: he already
knows the principles of the “organization,” its regulations
and dangers, and even more he has shown himself
capable of overcoming the caste barrier.

In fact, we are the untouchables to the civilians.
They think, more or less explicitly — with all the
nuances lying between contempt and commiseration —
that as we have been condemned to this life of ours,
reduced to our condition, we must be tainted by some
mysterious, grave sin. They hear us speak in many
different languages, which they do not understand and
which sound to them as grotesque as animal noises;
they see us reduced to ignoble slavery, without hair,
without honour and without names, beaten every day,
more abject every day, and they never see in our eyes
a light of rebellion, or of peace, or of faith. They
know us as thieves and untrustworthy, muddy, ragged
and starving, and mistaking the effect for the cause,
they judge us worthy of our abasement. 1

This naturally does not stop many of them throwing

1 Who conld tell one of our faces from the other? For them
we are “Kazett,” a singular neuter word.

141

If This is a Man

us a piece of bread or a potato now and again, or
giving us their bowls, after the distribution of the
“ Zivilsuppe ” in the work-yards, to scrape and give back
washed. They do it to get rid of some importunate
starved look, or through a momentary impulse of
humanity, or through simple curiosity to see us running
from all sides to figfit each other for the scrap, bestially
and without restraint, until the strongest one gobbles
ti up, whereupon all the others limp away, frustrated.

Now nothing of this sort occurred between me and
Lorenzo. However little sense there may be in trying
to specify why I, rather than thousands of others, managed
to survive the test, I believe that it was really due to
Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his
material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me
by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of
being good, that there still existed a just world outside
our own, something and someone still pure and whole,
not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror;
something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good,
but for which it was worth surviving.

The personages in these pages are not men. Their
humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it,
under an offence received or inflicted on someone else.
The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals,
the criminals, the prominents, great and small, down
to the indifferent slave Haftlinge, all the grades of the
mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically
fraternize in a uniform internal desolation.

But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and
uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation.
Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I
myself was a man.

142

October 1944

We fought with all our strength to prevent the
arrival of winter. We clung to all the warm hours,
at every dusk we tried to keep the sun in the sky for
a little longer, but it was all in vain. Yesterday evening
the sun went down irrevocably behind a confusion of
dirty clouds, chimney stacks and wires, and today it is
winter.

We know what it means because we were here last
winter; and the others will soon learn. It means that
in the course of these months, from October till April,
seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die
will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from
the morning before dawn until the distribution of
the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles
continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our
arms under our shoulders against the cold. We will
have to spend bread to acquire gloves, and lose hours
of sleep to repair them when they become unstitched.
As it will no longer be possible to eat in the open, we
will have to eat our meals in the hut, on our feet,
everyone will be assigned an area of floor as large as

143

If This is a Man

a hand, as it is forbidden to rest against the bunks.
Wounds will open on everyone’s hands, and to be given
a bandage will mean waiting every evening for hours
on one’s feet in the snow and wind.

Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a
meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word.
We say “hunger,” we say “tiredness,” “fear,” “pain,” we
say “winter” and they are different things. They are
free words, created and used by free men who lived in
comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers
had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have
been born; and only this language could express what
it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the
temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, under¬
pants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing
but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing
nearer.

In the same way in which one sees a hope end,
winter arrived this morning. We realized it when we
left the hut to go and wash: there were no stars, the
dark cold air had the smell of snow. In roll-call square,
in the grey of dawn, when we assembled for work,
no one spoke. When we saw the first flakes of snow,
we thought that if at the same time last year they had
told us that we would have seen another winter in
Lager, we would have gone and touched the electric
wire-fence; and that even now we would go if we were
logical, were it not for this last senseless crazy residue
of unavoidable hope.

Because “winter” means yet another thing.

Last spring the Germans had constructed two huge
tents in an open space in the Lager. For the whole of
the good season each of them had catered for over a
thousand men: now the tents had been taken down,

144

October 1944

and an excess two thousand guests crowded our huts.
We old prisoners knew that the Germans did not like
these irregularities and that something would soon happen
to reduce our number.

One feels the selections arriving. ‘ Selekcja the
hybrid Latin and Polish word is heard once, twice, many
times, interpolated in foreign conversations; at first we
cannot distinguish it, then it forces itself on our attention,
and in the end it persecutes us.

This morning the Poles had said “ Selekcja The
Poles are the first to find out the news, and they generally
try not to let it spread around, because to know something
which the others still do not know can always be useful.
By the time that everyone realizes that a selection is
imminent, the few possibilities of evading it (corrupting
some doctor or some prominent with bread or tobacco;
leaving the hut for Ka-Be or vice-versa at the right
moment so as to cross with the commission) are already
their monopoly.

In the days which follow, the atmosphere of the
Lager and the yard is filled with “Selekcja”: nobody
knows anything definite, but all speak about it, even
the Polish, Italian, French civilian workers whom we
secretly see in the yard. Yet the result is hardly a wave
of despondency: our collective morale is too inarticulate
and flat to be unstable. The fight against hunger, cold
and work leaves little margin for thought, even for
this thought. Everybody reacts in his own way, but
hardly anyone with those attitudes which would seem
the most plausible as the most realistic, that is with
resignation or despair.

All those able to find a way out, try to take it; but
they are the minority because it is very difficult to escape
from a selection. The Germans apply themselves to these
things with great skill and diligence.

145

If This is a Man

Whoever is unable to prepare for it materially, seeks
defence elsewhere. In the latrines, in the washroom,
we show each other our chests, our buttocks, our thighs,
and our comrades reassure us: “You are all right, it
will certainly not be your turn this time,... du hist kein
Muselmann... more probably mine...” and they undo
their braces in turn and pull up their shirts.

Nobody refuses this charity to another: nobody is
so sure of his own lot to be able to condemn others.
I brazenly lied to old Wertheimer; I told him that if
they questioned him, he should reply that he was forty
five, and he should not forget to have a shave the
evening before, even if it cost him a quarter-ration of
bread; apart from that he need have no fears, and in
any case it was by no means certain that it was a
selection for the gaschamber; had he not heard the
Blockdltester say that those chosen would go to Jaworszno
to a convalescent camp?

It is absurd of Wertheimer to hope: he looks sixty,
he has enormous varicose veins, he hardly even notices
the hunger any more. But he lies down on his bed,
serene and quiet, and replies to someone who asks him
with my own words; they are the command-words in
the camp these days: I myself repeated them just as
— apart from details — Chajim told them to me, Chajim,
who has been in Lager for three years, and being strong
and robust is wonderfully sure of himself; and I believed
them.

On this slender basis I also lived through the great
selection of October 1944 with inconceivable tranquillity.
I was tranquil because I managed to lie to myself
sufficiently. The fact that I was not selected depended
above all on chance and does not prove that my faith
was well-founded.

Monsieur Pinkert is also, a priori, condemned: it is

146

October 1944

enough to look at his eyes. He calls me over with a
sign, and with a confidential air tells me that he has been
informed — he cannot tell me the sourse of information
— that this time there is really something new: the
Holy See, by means of the International Red Cross... in
short, he personally guarantees both for himself and for
me, in the most absolute manner, that every danger is
ruled out; as a civilian he was, as is well known, attach^
to the Belgian embassy at Warsaw.

Thus in various ways, even those days of vigil, which
in the telling seem as if they ought to have passed every
limit of human torment, went by not very differently
from other days.

The discipline in both the Lager and Buna is in no
way relaxed: the work, cold and hunger are sufficient
to fill up every thinking moment.

Today is working Sunday, Arbeitssonntag : we work
until one p.m., then we return to camp for the shower,
shave and general control for skin diseases and lice.
And in the yards, everyone knew mysteriously that the
selection would be today.

The news arrived, as always, surrounded by a halo
of contradictory or suspect details: the selection in the
infirmary took place this morning; the percentage was
seven per cent of the whole camp, thirty, fifty per cent
of the patients. At Birkenau, the crematorium chimney
has been smoking for ten days. Room has to be made
for an enormous convoy arriving from the Poznan ghetto.
The young tell the young that all the old ones will be
chosen. The healthy tell the healthy that only the ill
will be chosen. Specialists will be excluded. German
Jews will be excluded. Low Numbers will be excluded.
You will be chosen. I will be excluded.

At one p.m. exactly the yard empties in orderly

147

If This is a Man

fashion, and for two hours the grey unending army
files past the two control stations where, as on every day,
we are counted and recounted, and past the military
band which for two hours without interruption plays, as
on every day, those marches to which we must synchronize
our steps at our entrance and our exit.

It seems like every day, the kitchen chimney smokes
as usual, the distribution of the soup is already beginning.
But then the bell is heard, and at that moment we
realize that we have arrived.

Because this bell always sounds at dawn, when it
means the reveille; but if it sounds during the day, it
means “ Blocksperre enclosure in huts, and this happens
when there is a selection to prevent anyone avoiding
it, or when those selected leave for the gas, to prevent
anyone seeing them leave.

Our Blockdltester knows his business. He has made
sure that we have all entered, he has had the door
locked, he has given everyone his card with his number,
name, profession, age and nationality and he has ordered
everyone to undress completely, except for shoes. We
wait like this, naked, with the card in our hands, for the
commission to reach our hut. We are hut 48, but one
can never tell if they are going to begin at hut 1 or
hut 60. At any rate, we can rest quietly at least for an
hour, and there is no reason why we should not get
under the blankets on the bunk and keep warm.

Many are already drowsing when a barrage of orders,
oaths and blows proclaim the imminent arrival of the
commission. The Blockdltester and his helpers, starting
at the end of the dormitory, drive the crowd of frightened,
naked people in front of them and cram them in the
Tagesraum which is the Quartermaster’s office. The

148

October 1944

Tagesraum is a room seven yards by four: when the
drive is over, a warm and compact human mass is
jammed into the Tagesraum, perfectly filling all the
corners, exercizing such a pressure on the wooden walls
as to make them creak.

Now we are all in the Tagesraum, and besides there
being no time, there is not even any room in which to
be afraid. The feeling of the warm flesh pressing all
around is unusual and not unpleasant. One has to take
care to hold up one’s nose so as to breathe, and not to
crumple or lose the card in one’s hand.

The Blockiiltester has closed the connecting-door and
has opened the other two which lead from the dormitory
and the Tagesraum outside. Here, in front of the two
doors, stands the arbiter of our fate, an SS subaltern.
On his right is the Blockiiltester, on his left, the
quartermaster of the hut. Each one of us, as he comes
naked out of the Tagesraum into the cold October air,
has to run the few steps between the two doors, give
the card to the SS man and enter the dormitory door.
The SS man, in the fraction of a second between two
successive crossings, with a glance at one’s back and
front, judges everyone’s fate, and in turn gives the card
to the man on his right or his left, and this is the life
or death of each of us. In three or four minutes a hut
of two hundred men is “done,” as is the whole camp of
twelve thousand men in the course of the afternoon.

Jammed in the charnel-house of the Tagesraum, I
gradually felt the human pressure around me slacken,
and in a short time it was my turn. Like everyone,
I passed by with a brisk and elastic step, trying to
hold my head high, my chest forward and my muscles
contracted and conspicous. With the corner of my eye
I tried to look behind my shoulders, and my card seemed
to end on the right.

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If This is a Man

As we gradually come back into the dormitory we are
allowed to dress ourselves. Nobody yet knows with
certainty his own fate, it has first of all to be established
whether the condemned cards were those on the right
or on the left. By now there is no longer any point in
sparing each other’s feelings with superstitious scruples.
Everybody crowds around the oldest, the most wasted-
away, the most “muselmann”; if their cards went to the
left, the left is certainly the side of the condemned.

Even before the selection is over, everybody knows
that the left was effectively the “schlechte Seite," the
bad side. There have naturally been some irregularities:
Rene, for example, so young and robust, ended on the
left; perhaps it was because he has glasses, perhaps
because he walks a little stooped like a myope, but
more probably because of a simple mistake: Rene passed
the commission immediately in front of me and there
could have been a mistake with our cards. I think
about it, discuss it with Alberto, and we agree that the
hypothesis is probable; I do not know what I will think
tomorrow and later; today I feel no distinct emotion.

It must equally have been a mistake about Sattler, a
huge Transylvanian peasant who was still at home only
twenty days ago; Sattler does not understand German,
he has understood nothing of what has taken place,
and stands in a corner mending his shirt. Must I go
and tell him that his shirt will be of no more use?

There is nothing surprising about these mistakes:
the examination is too quick and summary, and in any
case, the important thing for the Lager is not that the
most useless prisoners be eliminated, but that free posts
be quickly created, according to a certain percentage
previously fixed.

150

October 1944

The selection is now over in our hut, but it continues
in the others, so that we are still locked in. But as the
soup-pots have arrived in the meantime, the Blockaltester
decides to proceed with the distribution at once. A
double ration will be given to those selected. I have
never discovered if this was a ridiculously charitable
initiative of the Blockaltester, or an explicit disposition
of the SS, but in fact, in the interval of two or three days
(sometimes even much longer) between the selection
and the departure, the victims at Monowitz-Auschwitz
enjoyed this privilege.

Ziegler holds out his bowl, collects his normal ration
and then waits there expectantly. “What do you want?”
asks the Blockaltester: according to him, Ziegler is
entitled to no supplement, and he drives him away,
but Ziegler returns and humbly persists. He was on
the left, everybody saw it, let the Blockaltester check
the cards; he has the right to a double ration. When
he is given it, he goes quietly to his bunk to eat.

Now everyone is busy scraping the bottom of his
bowl with his spoon so as not to waste the last drops
of the soup; a confused, metallic clatter, signifying the
end of the day. Silence slowly prevails and then, from
my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn
praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying
backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking
God because he has not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the
Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty
years old and is going to the gas-chamber the day after
tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly
at the light without saying anything and without even
thinking anymore? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next
time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand

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If This is a Man

that what has happened today is an abomination, which
no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the
guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can
ever clean again.

If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.

152

Kraus

When it rains we would like to cry. It is November,
it has been raining for ten days now and the ground
is like the bottom of a swamp. Everything made of
wood gives out a smell of mushrooms.

If I could walk ten steps to the left I would be
under shelter in the shed; a sack to cover my shoulders
would be sufficient, or even the prospect of a fire where
I could dry myself; or even a dry rag to put between
my shirt and my back. Between one movement of the
shovel and another I think about it, and I really believe
that to have a dry rag would be positive happiness.

By now it would be impossible to be wetter; I will
just have to pay attention to move as little as possible,
and above all not to make new movements, to prevent
some other part of my skin coming into unnecessary
contact with my soaking, icy clothes.

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how
in some way one always has the impression of being
fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinite¬
simal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and
allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or

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If This is a Man

else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know
that this evening it is your turn for the supplement
of soup, so that even today you find the strength to
reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have
the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really
had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but
suffering and tedium — as sometimes happens, when
you really seem to lie on the bottom, — well, even
in that case, at any moment you want you could always
go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself
under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

We have been stuck in the mud since the morning,
legs akimbo, with our feet sinking ever deeper in the
selfsame holes in the glutinous soil. We sway on our
haunches at every swing of the shovel. I am half-way
down the pit, Kraus and Clausner are at the bottom,
Gounan is above me at surface level. Only Gounan
can look around, and every now and again he warns
Kraus curtly of the need to quicken the pace or even
to rest, according to who is passing by in the road.
Clausner uses the pickaxe, Kraus lifts the earth up
to me on his shovel, and I gradually pass it up to
Gounan who piles it up on one side. Others form
a shuttle service with wheelbarrows and carry the earth
somewhere, of no interest to us. Our world today is
this hole of mud.

Kraus misses his stroke, a lump of mud flies up and
splatters over my knees. It is not the first time it has
happened, I warn him to be careful, but without much
hope: he is Hungarian, he understands German badly
and does not know a word of French. He is tall and thin,
wears glasses and has a curious, small, twisted face;
when he laughs he looks like a child, and he often
laughs. He works too much and too vigorously: he

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Kraus

has not yet learnt our underground art of economizing
on everything, on breath, movements, even thoughts.
He does not yet know that it is better to be beaten,
because one does not normally die of blows, but one
does of exhaustion, and badly, and when one grows aware
of it, it is already too late. He still thinks... oh no,
poor Kraus, his is not reasoning, it is only the stupid
honesty of a small employee, he brought it along with
him, and he seems to think that his present situation
is like outside, where it is honest and logical to work,
as well as being of advantage, because according to what
everyone says, the more one works the more one earns
and eats.

u Regardez-moi ga!... Pas si vite, idiot!" Gounan
swears at him from above; then he remembers to translate
it in German: “ Langsman , du bidder Einer, langsman,
verstandeni" Kraus can kill himself through exhaustion
if he wants to, but not today, because we are working
in a chain and the rhythm of the work is set by him.

There goes the siren of the carbide factory, now
the English prisoners are leaving; it is half past four.
Then the Ukrainian girls will leave and it will be five
o’clock and we will be able to straighten our backs,
and only the return march, the roll-call and the lice-
control will separate us from our rest.

It is assembly time, “ Antreten ’ from all sides; from
all sides the mud puppets creep out, stretch their cramped
limbs, carry the tools back to the huts. We extract
our feet from the ditch cautiously so as not to let our
shoes be sucked off, and leave, dripping and swaying,
to line up for the return march. “Z# dreien ,” in threes.
I tried to place myself near to Alberto as we had worked
separately today and we both wanted to ask each other
how it had gone; but someone hit me in the stomach
and I finished behind him, right next to Kraus.

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If This is a Man

Now we leave. The Kapo marks time in a hard
voice: “Links, links, links at first, our feet hurt, then we
slowly grow warm and our nerves relax. We have bored
our way through all the minutes of the day, this very
day which seemed invincible and eternal this morning;
now it lies dead and is immediately forgotten; already
it is no longer a day, it has left no trace in anybody’s
memory. We know that tomorrow will be like today:
perhaps it will rain a little more or a little less, or
perhaps instead of digging soil we will go and unload
bricks at the Carbide factory. Or the war might even
finish tomorrow, or we might all be killed or transferred
to another camp, or one of those great changes might
take place which, ever since the Lager has been the Lager,
have been infaticably foretold as imminent and certain.
But who can seriously think about tomorrow?

Memory is a curious instrument: ever since I have
been in the camp, two lines written by a friend of mine
a long time ago have been running through my mind:

“... Until one day

there will be no more sense in saying: tomorrow.”

It is like that here. Do you know how one says
“never” in camp slang? “Morgen friih ,” tomorrow
morning.

It is now the hour of “links, links, links und links,"
the hour in which one must not lose step. Kraus is
clumsy, he has already been kicked by the Kapo because
he is incapable of walking in line: and now he is
beginning to gesticulate and chew a miserable German,
listen, listen, he wants to apologize for the spadeful
of mud, he has not yet understood where we are, I must
say Hungarians are really a most singular people.

To keep step and carry on a complicated conversation

156

Kraus

in German is too much. This time it is I to warn him
that he has lost step; I look at him and I see his eyes
behind the drops of water on his glasses, and they are
the eyes of the man Kraus.

Then an important thing happened, and it is worth
telling now, perhaps for the same reason that it happened
then. I began to make a long speech to Kraus: in
bad German, but slowly, separating the words, making
sure after each sentence that he had understood.

I told him that I had dreamt that I was at home,
the home where I was born, with my family, sitting
with my legs under the table, and on the table great deal,
a very great deal to eat. And it was summer and it was
in Italy — at Naples?... yes, at Naples, this is hardly the
time to quibble. Then all of a sudden the bell rang,
and I got up hurriedly and went to open the door,
and who did I see? I saw him, this very Kraus Pali,
with hair grown, clean and well nourished and dressed
as a free man, with a loaf of bread in his hand. Yes, a
loaf of four pounds, still warm. Then “ Servus , Pali, wie
geht’sl" and I felt filled with joy and made him come
in, and I explained to my parents who he was, and that
he had come from Budapest, and why he was so wet;
because he was soaking, just like now. And I gave him
food and drink and a good bed to sleep in, and it was
nightime, but there was a wonderful warmth so that
we were all dry in a moment (yes, I was also very wet).

What a good boy Kraus must have been as a civilian:
he will not survive very long here, one can see it at the
first glance, it is as logical as a theorem. I am sorry
I do not know Hungarian, for his emotion has broken
the dykes, and he is breaking out in a flood of outlandish
Magyar words. I cannot understand anything except
my name, but by the solemn gestures one would say
that he is making promises and prophecies.

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If This is a Man

Poor silly Kraus. If he only knew that it is not true,
that I have really dreamt nothing about him, that he
is nothing to me except for a brief moment, nothing
like everything is nothing down here, except the hunger
inside and the cold and the rain around.

158

Die drei Leute vom Labor

How many months have gone by since we entered
the camp? How many since the day I was dismissed
from Ka-Be? And since the day of the chemistry
examination? And since the October selection?

Alberto and I often ask ourselves these questions,
and many others as well. We were ninety-six when
we arrived, we, the Italians of convoy 174,000; only
twenty-nine of us survived until October, and of these,
eight went in the selection. We are now twenty-one
and the winter has hardly begun. How many of us
will be alive at the new year? How many when spring
begins ?

There have been no air raids now for several weeks;
the November rain has turned to snow, and the snow
has covered the ruins. The Germans and Poles go to
work in rubber jackboots, woollen ear-pads and padded
overalls; the English prisoners have their wonderful
fur-lined jackets. They have distributed no overcoats
in our Lager except to a few of the privileged; we are
a specialized Kommando, which — in theory — only

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If This is a Man

works under shelter; so we are left in our summer
outfits.

We are the chemists, “therefore” we work at the
phenylbeta sacks. We cleared out the warehouse after
the first air raids in the height of the summer. The
phenylbeta seeped under our clothes and stuck to our
sweating limbs and chafed us like leprosy; the skin
came off our faces in large burnt patches. Then the
air raids temporarily stopped and we carried the sacks
back into the warehouse. Then the warehouse was
hit and we took the sacks into the cellar of the styrene
department. Now the warehouse has been repaired and
once again we have to pile up the sacks there. The
caustic smell of the phenylbeta impregnates our only
suit, and follows us day and night like our shadows.
So far, the advantages of being in the Chemical
Kommando have been limited to the following: the
others have received overcoats while we have not; the
others carry 100 pound cement sacks, while we carry
125 pound phenylbeta sacks. How can we still think
about the chemistry examination and our illusions of
that time? At least four times during the summer we
have heard speak of Doktor Pannwitz’s laboratory in
Bau 939, and the rumour spread that the analysts
for the Polymerization Department would be chosen
among us.

But now it is time to stop, it is all over now. This
is the last act: the winter has begun, and with it our
last battle. There is no longer any reason to doubt
that it will be the last. Any time during the day when
we happen to listen to the voice of our bodies, or ask
our limbs, the answer is always the same: our strength
will not last out. Everything around us speaks of a
final decay and ruin. Half of Bau 939 is a heap of
twisted metal and smashed concrete; large deformed blue

160

Die drei Leute vom Labor

icicles hang like pillars from the enormous tubings where
the overheated steam used to roar. The Buna is silent
now, and when the wind is propitious, if one listens
hard, one can hear the continuous dull underground
rumbling of the front which is getting nearer. Three
hundred prisoners have arrived in the Lager from the Lodz
ghetto, transferred by the Germans before the Russian
advance: they told us mmours about the legendary battle
of the Warsaw ghetto, and they described how the
Germans had liquidated the Lublin camp over a year ago:
four machine-guns in the corners and the huts set on
fire; the civilized world will never know about it. When
will it be our turn?

This morning the Kapo divided up the squads as
usual. The Magnesium Chloride ten to the Magnesium
Chloride: and they leave, dragging their feet, as slowly
as possible, because the Magnesium Chloride is an
extremely unpleasant job; you stand all day up to your
ankles in cold, briny water, which soaks into your
shoes, your clothes and your skin. The Kapo grabs
hold of a brick and throws it among the group; they
get clumsily out of the way, but do not quicken their
pace. This is almost a custom, it happens every morning,
and does not always mean that the Kapo has a definite
intent to hurt.

The four of the Scheisshaus, to their work: and
the four attached to the building of the new latrine
leave. For when we exceeded the force of fifty
Haftlinge with the arrival of the convoys from Lodz
and Transylvania, the mysterious German bureaucrat who
supervizes these matters authorized us to build a
“Zweiplatziges Kommandoscheisshaus," i.e. a two-seated
closet reserved for our Kommando. We are not unaware
of this mark of distinction, which makes ours one of

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If This is a Man

the few Kommandos of which one can with reason boast
one’s membership: but it is evident that we will lose
one of the simplest of pretexts to absent ourselves
from work and arrange combinations with civilians.
“Noblesse oblige," says Henri, who has other strings
to his bow.

The twelve for the bricks. Meister Dahm’s five.
The two for the tanks. How many absent? Three absent.
Homolka gone into Ka-Be this morning, the ironsmith
dead yesterday, Francois transferred who knows where
or why. The roll-call is correct; the Kapo notes it down
and is satisfied. There are only us eighteen of the
phenylbeta left, beside the prominents of the Kommando.
And now the unexpected happens.

The Kapo says: — Doktor Pannwitz has communi¬
cated to the Arbeitsdienst that three Haftlinge have been
chosen for the Laboratory: 169509, Brackier; 175633,
Kandel; 174517, Levi —. For a moment my ears ring
and the Buna whirls around me. There are three Levis
in Kommando 98, but Hundert Vierundsiebzig Fiinf
Hundert Siebzelm is me, there is no possible doubt. I
am one of the three chosen.

The Kapo looks us up and down with a twisted
smile. A Belgian, a Rumanian and an Italian: three
“Franzosen ,” in short. Is it possible that three Franzosen
have really been chosen to enter the paradise of the
Laboratory?

Many comrades congratulate us; Alberto first of all,
with genuine joy, without a shadow of envy. Alberto
holds nothing against my fortune, he is really very
pleased, both because of our friendship and because he
will also gain from it. In fact, by now we two are
bound by a tight bond of alliance, by which every
“organized” scrap is divided into two strictly equal parts.
He has no reason to envy me, as he neither hoped

162

Die drei Leute vom Labor

nor desired to enter the Laboratory. The blood in his
veins is too free for this untamed friend of mine to
think of relaxing in a system; his instinct leads him
elsewhere, to other solutions, towards the unforeseen, the
impromptu, the new. Without hesitating, Alberto prefers
the uncertainties and battles of the “free profession”
to a good employment.

I have a ticket from the Arbeitsdienst in my pocket,
on which it is written that Haftling 174517, as a special¬
ized worker, has right to a new shirt and underpants
and must be shaved every Wednesday.

The ravaged Buna lies under the first snows, silent
and stiff like an enormous corpse; every day the sirens
of the Fliegeralarm wail; the Russians are fifty miles
away. The electric power station has stopped, the
methanol rectification columns no longer exist, three
of the four acetylene gasometers have been blown up.
Prisoners “reclaimed" from all the camps in east Poland
pour into our Lager haphazardly; the minority are set
to work, the majority leave immediately for Birkenau
and the Chimney. The ration has been still further
reduced. The Ka-Be is overflowing, the E-Haftlinge
have brought scarlet fever, diphtheria and petechial
typhus into the camp.

But Haftling 174517 has been promoted as a specialist
and has the right to a new shirt and underpants and
has to be shaved every Wednesday. No one can boast
of understanding the Germans.

We entered the Laboratory timid, suspicious and
bewildered like three wild beasts slinking into a large
city. How clean and polished the floor is! It is a
laboratory surprisingly like any other laboratory. Three
long work-benches covered with hundreds of familiar

163

If This is a Man

objects. The glass instruments in a corner to drip, the
precision balance, a Heraeus oven, a Hoppler thermostat.
The smell makes me start back as if from the blow of
a whip: the weak aromatic smell of organic chemistry
laboratories. For a moment the large semidark room
at the university, my fourth year, the mild air of May
in Italy comes back to me with brutal violence and
immediately vanishes.

Herr Stawinoga gives us our work-places. Stawinoga
is a German Pole, still young, with an energetic, but
sad and tired face. He is also Doktor: not of chemistry,
but (tie pas chercher a comprendre) of comparative
philology; all the same, he is head of the laboratory.
He does not speak to us willingly, but does not seem
ill-disposed. He calls us “Monsieur” which is ridiculous
and disconcerting.

The temperature in the laboratory is wonderful; the
thermometer reads 65° F. We agree that they can
make us wash the glass instruments, sweep the floor,
carry the hydrogen flasks, anything so as to remain
here, and so solve the problem of the winter for us.
And then, on a second examination, even the problem of
hunger should not be difficult to solve. Will they
really want to search us at the exit every day? And
even if they want to, will they do it every time that
we ask to go the latrine? Obviously not. And there is
soap, petrol, alcohol here. I will stitch a secret pocket
inside my jacket, and combine with the Englishman
who works in the repairs-yard and trades in petrol.
We will see how strict the supervision is: but by now
I have spent a year in the Lager and I know that if one
wants to steal and seriously sets one’s mind to it, no
supervision and no searchings can prevent it.

So it would seem that fate, by a new unsuspected
path, has arranged that we three, the object of envy

164

Die drei Leute vom Labor

of all the ten thousand condemned, suffer neither hunger
nor cold this winter. This means a strong probability
of not falling seriously ill, of not being frozen, of
overcoming the selections. In these conditions, those
less expert than us about things in the Lager might even
be tempted by the hope of survival and by the thought
of liberty. But we are not, we know how these matters
go; all this is the gift of fortune, to be enjoyed as
intensely as possible and at once; for there is no
certainty about tomorrow. At the first glass I break,
the first error in measurement, the first time my attention
is distracted, I will go back to waste away in the snow
and the wind until I am ready for the Chimney. And
besides, who knows what will happen when the Russians
come?

Because the Russians will come. The ground trembles
day and night under our feet; the muffled dull rumbling
of their artillery now bursts uninterrupted into the novel
silence of the Buna. One breathes a tense air, an air
of resolution. The Poles no longer work, the French
again walk with their head high. The English wink
at us and greet us on the aside with a “V” sign; and
not always on the aside.

But the Germans are deaf and blind, enclosed in
an armour of obstinacy and of wilful ignorance. Once
again they have named the date for the beginning of
the production of synthetic rubber: it will be the first
of February 1945. They construct shelters and trenches,
they repair the damage, they build, they fight, they
command, they organize and they kill. What else
could they do? They are Germans. This way of
behaviour is not meditated and deliberate, but follows
from their nature and from the destiny they have chosen.
They could not act differently: if you wound the body

165

If This is a Man

of a dying man, the wound will begin to heal, even
if the whole body dies within a day.

Every morning now, when the squads are divided,
the Kapo calls us three of the Laboratory before all the
others, “'die drei Leute vom Labor." In camp, in the
evenings and the mornings, nothing distinguishes me
from the flock, but during the day, at work, I am under
shelter and warm, and nobody beats me; I steal and
sell soap and petrol without serious risk, and perhaps
I will be given a coupon for a pair of leather shoes.
Even more, can this be called work? To work is to
push wagons, carry sleepers, break stones, dig earth,
press one’s bare hands against the iciness of the freezing
iron. But I sit all day, I have a note-book and a pencil
and they have even given me a book to refresh my
memory about analytical methods. I have a drawer
where I can put my beret and gloves, and when I want
to go out I only have to tell Herr Stawinoga, who never
says no and asks no questions if I delay; he has the air
of suffering in his flesh for the ruin which surrounds him.

My comrades in the Kommando envy me, and they
are right; should I not be contented? But in the morning,
I hardly escape the raging wind and cross the doorstep
of the laboratory when I find at my side the comrade
of all my peaceful moments, of Ka-Be, of the rest-Sundays
•—- the pain of remembering, the old ferocious longing
to feel myself a man, which attacks me like a dog
the moment my conscience comes out of the gloom.
Then I take my pencil and notebook and write what
I would never dare tell anyone.

Then there are the women. How long is it since
I have seen a woman? In Buna we quite often met
the Polish and Ukrainian women workers, in trousers
and leather jackets, huge and violent like their men.

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Die drei Leute vom Labor

They were sweaty and dishevelled in the summer, padded
out with thick clothes in the winter, and worked with
spades and pickaxes. We did not feel ourselves next
to women.

It is different here. Faced with the girls of the
laboratory, we three feel ourselves sink into the ground
from shame and embarassment. We know what we
look like: we see each other and sometimes we happen
to see our reflection in a clean window. We are ridiculous
and repugnant. Our cranium is bald on Monday, and
covered by a short brownish mould by Saturday. We
have a swollen and yellow face, marked permanently
by the cuts made by the hasty barber, and often by
bruises and numbed sores; our neck is long and knobbly,
like that of plucked chickens. Our clothes are incredibly
dirty, stained by mud, grease and blood; Kandel’s breeches
only arrive half-way down his calves, showing his bony,
hairy ankles; my jacket runs off my shoulders as if off
a wooden clothes-hanger. We are full of fleas, and
we often scratch ourselves shamelessly; we have to ask
permission to go the latrines with humiliating frequency.
Our wooden shoes are insupportably noisy and are
plastered with alternate layers of mud and regulation
grease.

Besides which, we are accustomed to our smell,
but the girls are not and never miss a chance of showing
it. It is not the generic smell of the badly washed, bu the
smell of the Haftling, faint and sweetish, which greeted
us at our arrival in the Lager and which tenaciously
pervades the dormitories, kitchens, washrooms and closets
of the Lager. One acquires it at once and one never
loses it: “so young and already stinking!” is our way
of greeting new arrivals.

To us the girls seem outside this world. There are
three young German girls, Fraulein Liczba, the Polish

167

If This is a Man

store-keeper, and Frau Meyer, the secretary. They have
smooth, rosy skin, beautiful attractive clothes, clean and
warm, blond hair, long and well-set; they speak with
grace and self-possession, and instead of keeping the
laboratory clean and in order, as they ought to, they
smoke in the corners, scandalously eat bread and jam,
file their nails, break a lot of glass vessels and then
try to put the blame on us; when they sweep, they sweep
our feet. They never speak to us and turn up their noses
when they see us shuffling across the laboratory, squalid
and filthy, awkward and insecure in our shoes. I once
asked Fraulein Liczba for some information, and she
did not reply but turned with an annoyed face to
Stawinoga and spoke to him quickly. I did not
understand the sentence, but I clearly grasped “ Stinkjude ”
and my blood froze. Stawinoga told me that for anything
to do with the work we should turn directly to him.

These girls sing, like girls sing in laboratories all
over the world, and it makes us deeply unhappy. They
talk among themselves: they talk about the rationing,
about their fiances, about their homes, about the
approaching holidays....

“Are you going home on Sunday? I am not, travelling
is so uncomfortable!”

“I am going home for Christmas. Only two weeks
and then it will be Christmas again; it hardly seems real,
this year has gone by so quickly!”

... This year has gone by so quickly. This time last
year I was a free man: an outlaw but free, I had a name
and a family, I had an eager and restless mind, an agile
and healthy body. I used to think of many, far-away
things: of my work, of the end of the war, of good
and evil, of the nature of things and of the laws which
govern human actions; and also of the mountains, of
singing and loving, of music, of poetry. I had an

168

Die drei Leute vom Labor

enormous, deep-rooted foolish faith in the benevolence
of fate; to kill and to die seemed extraneous literary
things to me. My days were both cheerful and sad,
but I regretted them equally, they were all full and
positive; the future stood before me as a great treasure.
Today the only thing left of the life of those days is
what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not
even alive enough to know how to kill myself.

If I spoke German better I could try to explain all
this to Frau Meyer; but she would certainly not
understand, or if she was so good and intelligent as to
understand, she would be unable to bear my proximity,
and would flee from me, as one flees from contact with
an incurable invalid, or from a man condemned to death.
Or perhaps she would give me a coupon for a pint of
civilian soup.

This year has gone by so quickly.

169

The Last One

By now Christmas is approaching. Alberto and I
are walking side by side in the long grey file, bending
forwards to resist the wind better. It is night and
it is snowing; it is not easy to keep on one’s feet,
and even more difficult to keep up the pace in line;
every now and again someone in front of us stumbles
and falls in the black mud, and one has to be careful
to avoid him and keep one’s place in the column.

Since I started work in the Laboratory, Alberto
and I work separately and we always have many things
to tell each other on the return march. They are not
usually things on a high level: about work, or our
comrades, or the bread or the cold. But for a week
now there had been something new: every evening
Lorenzo brings us six or eight pints of soup from
the Italian civilian workers. To solve the problem of
transport, we had to procure what is called a “ menaschka ”
here, that is, a zinc-pot, made to order, more like a
bucket than a pot. Silberlust, the tin-smith, made it
for us from two scraps of a gutter in exchange for three

171

If This is a Man

rations of bread; it was a splendid, sturdy, capacious
pitcher, with the characteristic shape of a neolithic tool.

In the whole camp there are only a few Greeks who
have a menaschka larger than ours. Besides the material
advantages, it carries with it a perceptible improvement
in our social standing. A menaschka like ours is a
diploma of nobility, a heraldic emblem: Henri is
becoming our friend and speaks to us on equal terms;
L. has assumed a paternal and condescending air; as for
Elias, he is perpetually at our side, and although he
spies on us with tenacity to discover the secret of our
“ organisacja ,” he overwhelms us at the same time with
incomprehensible declarations of solidarity and affection,
and deafens us with a litany of portentous obscenities and
oaths in Italian and French which he learnt somewhere
and by which he obviously means to honour us.

As for the moral aspect of the new state of affairs,
Alberto and I are forced to agree that there is nothing
to be very proud of; but it is so easy to find justifications!
Besides, the very fact that we have new things to talk
about is no negligible gain.

We talk about our plan to buy a second menaschka
to rotate with the first, so as to make only one expedition
a day to the remote corner of the yard where Lorenzo is
now working will be sufficient. We speak about Lorenzo
and how to reward him; later, if we return, we will of
course do everything we can for him; but of what use is
it to talk about that? He knows as well as us that we can
hardly hope to return. We ought to do something at
once; we could try to have his shoes repaired at the
cobbler’s shop in our Lager where repairs are free (it
seems a paradox, but officially everything was free in
the extermination camps). Alberto will try: he is a friend
of the head-cobbler, perhaps a few pints of soup will
be enough.

172

The Last One

We talk about three new exploits of ours, and we
agree that for obvious reasons of professional secrecy
it is inadvisable to talk about them at large: it is a
pity, our personal prestige would be greatly increased.

As for the first, it is my brain-child. I knew that
the Blockaltester of Block 44 was short of brooms and
I stole one in the yard; as far as this goes there is nothing
extraordinary. The difficulty was to smuggle the broom
into Lager on the return march, and I solved it in what
I believe to be a completely original way: I took apart
the handle and the head of the broom, sawing the former
into two pieces and carrying the various parts separately
into camp (the two pieces of the handle tied to my
thighs inside my trousers) and then reconstructed the
whole article. This required a piece of tin-plate, a
hammer and nails to join together the two pieces of
wood. The whole business only took four days.

Contrary to what I feared, the customer not only did
not devalue my broom but showed it as a curiosity
to several of his friends, who gave me a regular order
for two other brooms “of the same model.”

But Alberto had other irons in the fire. In the
first place he had put the finishing touches to “ Operation
File” and had already carried it out successfully twice.
Alberto goes to the tool-store, asks for a file and chooses
a largish one. The storekeeper writes “one file” next
to his number and Alberto leaves. He goes straight
to a safe civilian (a gem of a rascal from Trieste, as
shrewd as they make them, who helps Alberto more for
love of the art than for interest or philanthropy), who
has no difficulty in exchanging the large file on the open
market for two small ones of equal or lesser value.
Alberto gives back “one file” to the store and sells
the other.

And he has just crowned his achievements with his

173

If This is a Man

masterpiece, an audacious new combination of singular
elegance. It must first be stated that for some weeks
now Alberto had been entrusted with a special duty: at
the yard in the morning he is given a bucket with pliers,
screwdrivers and several hundred celluloid labels in
different colours, which he has to fit on to suitable clips
in order to tag the numerous and lengthy pipe of hot and
cold water, steam, compressed air, gas, naphtha, vacuum,
etc. which run in all directions throughout the Polymeri¬
zation Department. It must also be stated (and here
there seems to be no connection: but does not ingenuity
consist in the finding or creating of connections between
apparently extraneous orders of ideas?) that for all us
Hiiftlinge the shower constitutes a quite unpleasant
occurrence for various reasons (the water is lacking and
is cold or otherwise boiling, there is no changing-room,
we have no towels nor soap, and during our enforced
absence it is easy to be robbed). As the shower is
obligatory, the Blockalteste need a system of control
enabling them to apply sanctions against whoever tries
to evade it: usually a trusted member of the Block is
placed at the door, and like Polyphemus touches everyone
who comes out to feel if he is wet; if he is, he is given
a ticket, if he is dry, he is given five blows from a
truncheon. One can only claim one’s bread the following
morning by presenting the ticket.

Alberto’s attention concentrated on the tickets. In
general they are only wretched pieces of paper which
are given back damp, crumpled and unrecognizable. Al¬
berto knows his Germans and the Blockalteste are all
German, or German-trained: they love order, systems,
bureaucracy; even more, although rough and irascible
blockheads, they cherish an infantile delight in glittering,
many-coloured objects.

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The Last One

Having played the theme, there follows the brillant
development. Alberto systematically withdrew a series
of labels of the same colour; from each one he made
three small disks (I organized the necessary instrument,
a cork-borer, in the Laboratory): when two hundred disks
were ready, enough for a Block, he went to the
Blockaltester and offered him his “ Spezialitat ” at the mad
price of ten rations of bread, payment by instalments.
The customer accepted with enthusiasm, and Alberto now
has at his disposal a formidable article in fashion which
is guaranteed to be accepted in every hut, one colour per
hut: for no Blockaltester wants to be regarded as
niggardly or reactionary. Even more important, he has
no need to be afraid of rivals, as he alone has access to
the primary material. Is it not well thought out?

We talk about these things, stumbling from one
puddle to the other, between the black of the sky and
the mud of the road. We talk and we walk. I carry
the two empty bowls, Alberto the happy weight of the
full menasckka. Once again the music from the band,
the ceremony of “ Miitzen ab hats smartly off in front of
the SS; once more Arbeit Macht Fret, and the announce¬
ment of the Kapo: “ Kommando 98 , ztvei und sechzig
Hdftlinge, Starke stimmt” sixty-two prisoners, number
correct. But the column has not broken up, they have
made a march as far as the roll-call square. Is there
to be a roll-call? It is not a roll-call. We have seen
the crude glare of the searchlight and the well-known
profile of the gallows.

For more than an hour the squads continued to return,
with the hard clatter of their wooden shoes on the
frozen snow. When all the Kommandos had returned,
the band suddenly stopped and a raucous German voice
ordered silence. Another German voice rose up in the

175

If This is a Man

sudden quiet, and spoke for a long time angrily into the
dark and hostile air. Finally the condemned man was
brought out into the blaze of the searchlight.

All this pomp and ruthless ceremony are not new
to us. I have already watched thirteen hangings since I
entered the camp; but on the other occasions they were
for ordinary crimes, thefts from the kitchen, sabotage,
attempts to escape. Today it is different.

Last month one of the crematoriums at Birkenau had
been blown up. None of us knows (and perhaps no one
will ever know) exactly how the exploit was carried out:
there was talk of the Sonderkommando, the Special
Kommando attached to the gas chambers and the ovens,
which is itself periodically exterminated, and which is
kept scrupulously segregated from the rest of the camp.
The fact remains that a few hundred men at Birkenau,
helpless and exhausted slaves like ourselves, had found
in themselves the strength to act, to mature the fruits
of their hatred.

The man who is to die in front of us today in some
way took part in the revolt. They say he had contacts
with the rebels of Birkenau, that he carried arms into
our camp, that he was plotting a simultaneous mutiny
among us. He is to die today before our very eyes: and
perhaps the Germans do not understand that this solitary
death, this man’s death which has been reserved for
him, will bring him glory, not infamy.

At the end of the German’s speech, which nobody
understood, the raucous voice of before again rose up:
“Haht ihr verst and en?" Have you understood?

Who answered “ Jawohl?" Everybody and nobody: it
was as if our cursed resignation took body by itself,
as if it turned into a collective voice above our heads.
But everyone heard the cry of the doomed man, it
pierced through the old thick barriers of inertia and

176

The Last One

submissiveness, it struck the living core of man in each
of us:

“ Kamaraden, icb bin der Letzte!" (Comrades, I am
the last one!).

I wish I could say that from the midst of us, an
abject flock, a voice rose, a murmur, a sign of assent.
But nothing happened. We remained standing, bent and
grey, our heads dropped, and we did not uncover our
heads until the German ordered us to do so. The trap¬
door opened, the body wriggled horribly; the band began
playing again and we were once more lined up and
filed past the quivering body of the dying man.

At the foot of the gallows, the SS watch us pass
with indifferent eyes: their work is finished, and well
finished. The Russians can come now: there are no
longer any strong men among us, the last one is now
hanging above our heads, and as for the others, a few
halters had been enough. The Russians can come now:
they will only find us, the slaves, the worn-out, worthy
of the unarmed death which awaits us.

To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as
to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you
Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under
your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to
fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not
even a look of judgement.

Alberto and I went back to the hut, and we could
not look each other in the face. That man must have
been tough, he must have been made of another metal
than us if this condition of ours, which has broken us,
could not bend him.

Because we also are broken, conquered: even if we
know how to adapt ourselves, even if we have finally

177

If This is a Man

learnt how to find our food and to resist the fatigue
and cold, even if we return home.

We lifted the menaschka on to the bunk and divided
it, we satisfied the daily ragings of hunger, and now we
are oppressed by shame.

178

The Story of Ten Days

Already for some months now the distant booming
of the Russian guns had been heard at intervals when,
on the January 11, 1945, I fell ill of scarlet fever
and was once more sent into Ka-Be. “Infektionsab-
teilug ": it meant a small room, really quite clean, with
ten bunks on two levels, a wardrobe, three stools, and
a closet seat with the pail for corporal needs. All in a
space of three yards by five.

It was difficult to climb to the upper bunks as there
was no ladder; so, when a patient got worse he was
transferred to the lower bunks.

When I was admitted I was the thirteenth in the
room. Four of the others — two French political
prisoners and two young Hungarian Jews — had scarlet
fever; there were three with diphtheria, two with typhus,
while one suffered from a repellent facial erysipelas. The
other two had more than one illness and were incredibly
wasted away.

I had a high fever. I was lucky enough to have
a bunk entirely to myself: I laid down with relief

179

If This is a Man

knowing that I had the right to forty days’ isolation and
therefore of rest, while I felt myself still sufficiently
strong to fear neither the consequences of scarlet fever
nor the selections.

Thanks to my by-now long experience of camp life
I managed to bring with me all my personal belongings:
a belt of interlaced electric wire, the knife-spoon, a
needle with three needlefuls, five buttons, and last of all
eighteen flints which I had stolen from the Laboratory.
From each of these, shaping them patiently with a knife,
it was possible to make three smaller flints, just the right
gauge for a normal cigarette lighter. They were valued
at six or seven rations of bread.

I enjoyed four peaceful days. Outside it was snowing
and very cold, but the room was heated. I was given
strong doses of sulpha drugs, I suffered from an intense
feeling of sickness and was hardly able to eat; I did
not want to talk.

The two Frenchmen with scarlet fever were quite
pleasant. They were provincials from the Vosges who
had entered the camp only a few days before with a
large convoy of civilians swept up by the Germans in
their retreat from Lorraine. The elder one was named
Arthur, a peasant, small and thin. The other, his bed-
companion, was Charles, a scool teacher, thirty-two years
old; instead of a shirt he had been given a summer vest,
ridiculously short.

On the fifth day the barber came. He was a Greek
from Salonica: he spoke only the beautiful Spanish of
his people, but understood some words of all the languages
spoken in the camp. He was called Askenazi and had
been in the camp for almost three years. I do not know
how he managed to get the post of Frisor of Ka-Be: he
spoke neither German nor Polish, nor was he in fact
excessively brutal. Before he entered, I heard him

180

The Story of Ten Days

speaking excitedly for a long time in the corridor with
one of the doctors, a compatriot of his. He seemed
to have an unusual look on his face, but as the expressions
of the Levantines are different from ours, I could not
tell whether he was afraid or happy or merely upset.
He knew me, or at least knew that I was Italian.

When it was my turn I climbed down laboriously
from the bunk. I asked him in Italian if there was
anything new: he stopped shaving me, winked in a
serious and allusive manner, pointed to the window with
his chin, and then made a sweeping gesture with his
hand towards the west.

“ Morgen, alle Kamarad weg .”

He looked at me for a moment with his eyes wide-
open, as if waiting for a reaction, and then he added:
“ todos, todos" and returned to his work. He knew about
my flints and shaved me with a certain gentleness.

The news excited no direct emotion in me. Already
for many months I had no longer felt any pain, joy
or fear, except in that detached and distant manner
characteristic of the Lager, which might be described as
conditional: if I still had my former sensitivity, I thought,
this would be an extremely moving moment.

My ideas were perfectly clear; for a long time now
Alberto and I had foreseen the dangers which would
accompany the evacuation of the camp and the liberation.
As for the rest, Askenazi’s news was merely a confirmation
of rumours which had been circulating for some days:
that the Russians were at Censtochowa, sixty miles to
the north; that they were at Zakopaxe, sixty miles to
the south; that at Buna the Germans were already
preparing the sabotage mines.

I looked at the faces of my comrades one by one:
it was clearly useless to discuss it with any of them.
They would have replied: “Well?” and it would all

181

If This is a Man

have finished there. The French were different, they
were still fresh.

“Did you hear?” I said to them. “Tomorrow they
are going to evacuate the camp.”

They overwhelmed me with questions. “Where to?
On foot?... The ill ones as well? Those who cannot
walk?” They knew that I was an old prisoner and
that I understood German, and deduced that I knew
much more about the matter than I wanted to admit.

I did not know anything more: I told them so but
they continued to ask questions. How stupid of them!
But of course, they had only been in the Lager for a week
and had not yet learnt that one did not ask questions.

In the afternoon the Greek doctor came. He said
that all patients able to walk would be given shoes and
clothes and would leave the following day with the
healthy ones on a twelve mile march. The others would
remain in Ka-Be with assistants to be chosen from the
patients least ill.

The doctor was unusually cheerful, he seemed drunk.
I knew him: he was a cultured, intelligent man, egoistic
and calculating. He added that everyone, without
distinction, would receive a triple ration of bread, at
which the patients visibly cheered up. We asked him
what would happen to us. He replied that probably the
Germans would leave us to our fate: no, he did not
think that they would kill us. He made no effort to
hide the fact that he thought otherwise. His very
cheerfulness boded ill.

He was already equipped for the march. He had
hardly gone out when the two Hungarian boys began
to speak excitedly to each other. They were in an
advanced state of convalescence but extremely wasted
away. It was obvious that they were afraid to stay
with the patients and were deciding to go with the

182

The Story of Ten Days

healthy ones. It was not a question of reasoning: I would
probably also have followed the instinct of the flock if
I had not felt so weak; fear is supremely contagious,
and its immediate reaction is to make one try to run
away.

Outside the hut the camp sounded unusually excited.
One of the two Hungarians got up, went out and returned
half an hour later laden with filthy rags. He must have
taken them from the store-house of clothes still to be
disinfected. He and his comrade dressed feverishly,
putting on rag after rag. One could see that they were
in a hurry to have the matter over with before the
fear itself made them hesitate. It was crazy of them
to think of walking even for one hour, weak as they
were, especially in the snow with those broken-down
shoes found at the last moment. I tried to explain, but
they looked at me without replying. Their eyes were
like those of terrified cattle.

Just for a moment it flashed through my mind that
they might even be right. They climbed awkwardly out
of the window; I saw them, shapeless bundles, lurching
into the night. They did not return, I learnt much
later that, unable to continue, they had been killed by
the SS a few hours after the beginning of the march.

It was obvious that I, too, needed a pair of shoes.
But it took me an hour to overcome the feeling of
sickness, fever and inertia. I found a pair in the corridor.
(The healthy prisoners had ransacked the deposit of
the patients’ shoes and had taken the best ones; those
remaining, with split soles and unpaired, lay all over
the place). Just then I met Kosman, the Alsatian. As
a civilian he had been a Reuter correspondent at Clermont
Ferrand; he also was excited and euphoric. He said:
“If you return before me, write to the mayor of Metz
that I am about to come back.”

183

If This is a Man

Kosman was notorious for his acquaintances among
the Prominents, so his optimism seemed a good sign and
I used it to justify my inertia to myself; I hid the shoes
and returned to bed.

Late that night the Greek doctor returned with a
rucksack on his shoulders and a woollen hood. He
threw a French novel on my bed. “Keep it, read it,
Italian. You can give it back to me when we meet
again.” Even today I hate him for those words. He
knew that we were doomed.

And then finally Alberto came, defying the prohi¬
bition, to say goodbye to me from the window. We were
inseparable: we were “the two Italians” and foreigners
even mistook our names. For six months we had shared
a bunk and every scrap of food “organised” in excess
of the ration; but he had had scarlet fever as a child and
I was unable to infect him. So he left and I remained.
We said goodbye, not many words were needed, we
had already discussed our affairs countless times. We
did not think we would be separated for very long. He
had found a sturdy pair of leather shoes in a reasonable
condition: he was one of those fellows who immediately
find everything they need.

He also was cheerful and confident, as were all those
who were leaving. It was understandable: something
great and new was about to happen; we could finally
feel a force aroupd us which was not of Germany; we
could concretely feel the impending collapse of that hated
world of ours. At any rate, the healthy ones who,
despite all their tiredness and hunger, were still able
to move, could feel this. But it is obvious that whoever
is too weak, or naked or barefoot, thinks and feels in
a different way, and what dominated our thoughts was
the paralysing sensation of being totally helpless in the
hands of fate.

184

The Story of Ten Days

All the healthy prisoners (except a few prudent ones
who at the last moment undressed and hid themselves in
the hospital beds) left during the night of January 18,
1945. They must have been about twenty thousand,
coming from different camps. Almost in their entirety
they vanished during the evacuation march: Alberto was
among them. Perhaps someone will write their story
one day.

So we remained in our bunks, alone with our illnesses,
and with our inertia stronger than fear.

In the whole Ka-Be we numbered perhaps eight
hundred. In our room there were eleven of us, each in
his own bunk, except for Charles and Arthur who slept
together. The rhythm of the great machine of the Lager
was extinguished. For us began the ten days outside
both world and time.

January 18th. During the night of the evacuation the
camp-kitchens continued to function, and on the following
morning the last distribution of soup took place in the
hospital. The central-heating plant had been abandoned;
in the huts a little heat still lingered on, but hour by
hour the temperature dropped and it was evident that
we would soon suffer from the cold. Outside it must
have been at least 50°F. below zero; most of the patients
had only a shirt and some of them not even that.

Nobody knew what our fate would be. Some SS
men had remained, some of the guard towers were still
occupied.

About midday an SS officer made a tour of the huts.
He appointed a chief in each of them, selecting from
among the remaining non-Jews, and ordered a list of
the patients to be made at once, divided into Jews and
non-Jews. The matter seemed clear. No one was
surprised that the Germans preserved their national love

185

If This is a Man

of classifications until the very end, nor did any Jew
seriously expect to live until the following day.

The two Frenchmen had not understood and were
frightened. I translated the speech of the SS man. I was
annoyed that they should be afraid: they had not even
experienced a month of the Lager, they hardly suffered
from hunger yet, they were not even Jews, but they were
afraid.

There was one more distribution of bread. I spent
the afternoon reading the book left by the doctor: it
was interesting and I can remember it with curious
accuracy. I also made a visit to the neighbouring ward
in search of blankets; many patients had been sent out
from there and their blankets were free. I brought back
some quite heavy ones.

When Arthur heard that they came from the dysentery
ward, he looked disgusted: “Y avait point besoin de le
dire”; in fact, they were polluted. But I thought that in
any case, knowing what awaited us, we might as well
sleep comfortably.

It was soon night but the electric light remained on.
We saw with tranquil fear that an armed SS man stood
at the corner of the hut. I had no desire to talk and
was not afraid except in that external and conditional
manner I have described. I continued reading until late.

There were no clocks, but it must have been about
11 p. m. when all the lights went out, even those of
the reflectors on the guard-towers. One could see the
searchlight beams in the distance. A cluster of intense
lights burst out in the sky, remaining immobile, crudely
illuminating the earth. One could hear the roar of the
aeroplanes.

Then the bombardment began. It was nothing new:
I climbed down to the ground, put my bare feet into
my shoes, and waited.

186

The Story of Ten Days

It seemed far away, perhaps over Auschwitz.

But then there was a near explosion, and before one
could think, a second and a third one, loud enough
to burst one’s ear-drums. Windows were breaking, the
hut shook, the spoon I had fixed in the wall fell down.

Then it seemed all over. Cagnolati, a young peasant
also from the Vosges, had apparently never experienced
a raid. He had jumped out naked from his bed and
was concealed in a corner, screaming. After a few
minutes it was obvious that the camp had been struck.
Two huts were burning fiercely, another two had been
pulverized, but they were all empty. Dozens of patients
arrived, naked and wretched, from a hut threatened by
fire: they asked for shelter. It was impossible to take
them in. They insisted, begging and threatening in many
languages. We had to barricade the door. They dragged
themselves elsewhere, lit up by the flames, barefoot in
the melting snow. Many trailed behind them streaming
bandages. There seemed no danger to our hut, so long
as the wind did not change.

The Germans were no longer there. The towers were
empty.

Today I think that if for no other reason than that an
Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of
Providence. But without doubt in that hour the memory
of biblical salvations in times of extreme adversity passed
like a wind through all our minds.

It was impossible to sleep; a window was broken and
it was very cold. I was thinking that we would have
to find a stove to set up and get some coal, wood and
food. I knew that it was all essential, but without some
help I would never have had the energy to carry it out.
I spoke about it to the two Frenchmen.

187

If This is a Man

January 19th. The Frenchmen agreed. We got up
at dawn, we three. I felt ill and helpless, I was cold
and afraid.

The other patients looked at us with respectful
curiosity: did we not know that patients were not
allowed to leave Ka-Be? And if the Germans had not
all left? But they said nothing, they were glad that
someone was prepared to make the test.

The Frenchmen had no idea of the topography of
the Lager, but Charles was courageous and robust, while
Arthur was shrewd, with the practical commonsense of
the peasant. We went out into the wind of a freezing
day of fog, poorly wrapped up in blankets.

What we saw resembled nothing that I had ever seen
or heard described.

The Lager, hardly dead, had already begun to
decompose. No more water, or electricity, broken
windows and doors slamming to in the wind, loose iron-
sheets from the roofs screeching, ashes from the fire
drifting high, afar. The work of the bombs had been
completed by the work of man: ragged, decrepit,
skeleton-like patients at all able to move dragged
themselves everywhere on the frozen soil, like an invasion
of worms. They had ransacked all the empty huts in
search of food and wood; they had violated with senseless
fury the grotesquely adorned rooms of the hated
Blockdlteste, forbidden to the ordinary Flaftlinge until
the previous day; no longer in control of their own
bowels, they had fouled everywhere, polluting the precious
snow, the only source of water remaining in the whole
camp.

Around the smoking ruins of the burnt huts, groups
of patients lay stretched out on the ground, soaking up
its last warmth. Others had found potatoes somewhere
and were roasting them on the embers of the fire, glaring

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The Story of Ten Days

around with fierce eyes. A few had had the strength to
light a real fire, and were melting snow in it in any
handy receptacle.

We,hurried to the kitchens as fast as we could; but
the potatoes were already almost finished. We filled two
sacks and left them in Arthur’s keeping. Among the
ruins of the Prominenzhlock Charles and I finally found
what we were searching for: a heavy cast-iron stove, with
the flue still usable. Charles hurried over with a wheel¬
barrow and we loaded it on; he then left me with the
task of carrying it to the hut and ran back to the sacks.
There he found Arthur unconscious from the cold.
Charles picked up both sacks and carried them to safety,
then he took care of his friend.

Meanwhile, staggering with difficulty, I was trying to
manoeuvre the heavy wheelbarrow as best as possible.
There was the roar of an engine and an SS man entered
the camp on a motorcycle. As always when I saw their
hard faces I froze from terror and hatred. It was too
late to disappear and I did not want to abandon the
stove. The rules of the Lager stated that one must
stand at attention with head uncovered. I had no hat
and was encumbered by the blanket. I moved a few
steps away from the wheelbarrow and made a sort of
awkward bow. The German moved on without seeing
me, turned behind a hut and left. Only later did I
realize the danger I had run.

I finally reached the entrance of the hut and unloaded
the stove into Charles’s hands. I was completely
breathless from the effort, large black spots danced before
my eyes.

It was essential to get it working. We all three had
our hands paralysed while the icy metal stuck to the
skin of our fingers, but it was vitally urgent to set it up
to warm ourselves and to boil the potatoes. We had

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If This is a Man

found wood and coal as well as embers from the burnt
huts.

When the broken window was repaired and the stove
began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in
everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-
Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that
each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had
been working. And so it was agreed.

Only a day before a similar event would have been
inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: “eat your own
bread, and if you can, that of your neighbour,” and left
no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager
was dead.

It was the first human gesture that occurred among
us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the
beginning of the change by which we who had not died
slowly changed from Haftlinge to men again.

Arthur recovered quite well, but from then on always
avoided exposing himself to the cold; he undertook the
upkeep of the stove, the cooking of the potatoes, the
cleaning of the room and the helping of the patients.
Charles and I shared the various tasks outside. There
was still an hour of light: an expedition yielded us a pint
of spirits and a tin of yeast, thrown in the snow by
someone; we made a distribution of potatoes and one
spoonful of yeast per person. I thought vaguely that it
might help against lack of vitamins.

Darkness fell; in the whole camp ours was the only
room with a stove, of which we were very proud. Many
invalids from other wards crowded around the door,
but Charles’s imposing stature held them back. Nobody,
neither us nor them, thought that the inevitable prom¬
iscuity with our patients made it extremely dangerous
to stay in our room, and that to fall ill of diphtheria

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The Story of Ten Days

in those conditions was more surely fatal than jumping
off a fourth floor.

I myself was aware of it, but I did not dwell long
on the idea: for too long I had been accustomed to
think of death by illness as a possible event, and in that
case unavoidable, and anyhow beyond any possible
intervention on our part. And it did not even pass
through my mind that I could have gone to another
room in another hut with less danger of infection. The
stove, our creation, was here, and spread a wonderful
warmth; I had my bed here; and by now a tie united
us, the eleven patients of the Injektionsabteilung.

Very occasionally we heard the thundering of artillery,
both near and far, and at intervals the crackling of
automatic rifles. In the darkness, lighted only by the
glow of the embers, Arthur and I sat smoking cigarettes
made of herbs found in the kitchen, and spoke of
many things, both past and future. In the middle of
this endless plain, frozen and full of war, we felt at
peace with ourselves and with the world. We were
broken by tiredness, but we seemed to have finally
accomplished something useful — perhaps like God
after the first day of creation.

January 20th. The dawn came and it was my turn
to light the stove. Besides a general feeling of weakness,
the aching of my joints reminded me all the time that
my scarlet fever was far from over. The thought of
having to plunge into the freezing air to find a light in the
other huts made me shudder with disgust. I remembered
my flints: I sprinkled a piece of paper with spirits, and
patiently scraped a small pile of black dust on top of
it and then scraped the flint more vigorously with my
knife. And finally, after a few sparks, the small pile

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If This is a Man

caught fire and the small bluish flame of alcohol rose
from the paper.

Arthur climbed down enthusiastically from his bed
and heated three potatoes per person from those boiled
the day before; after which, Charles and I, starved and
shivering violently, left again to explore the decaying
camp.

We had enough food (that is, potatoes) for two days
only; as for water, we were forced to melt the snow,
an awkward operation in the absence of large pots,
which yielded a blackish, muddy liquid which had to be
filtered.

The camp was silent. Other starving spectres like
ourselves wandered around searching, unshaven with
hollow eyes, greyish skeleton bones in rags. Shaky on
their legs, they entered and left the empty huts carrying
the most varied of objects: axes, buckets, ladles, nails;
anything might be of use, and those looking furthest
ahead were already thinking of profitable commerce with
the Poles of the surrounding countryside.

In the kitchen we found two of them squabbling
over the last handfuls of putrid potatoes. They had
seized each other by their rags, and were fighting with
curiously slow and uncertain movements, cursing in
Yiddish between their frozen lips.

In the courtyard of the storehouse there were two
large piles of cabbages and turnips (those large, insipid
turnips, the basis of our diet). They were so frozen
that they could only be separated with a pickaxe. Charles
and I took turns, using all our energy at each stroke,
and we carried out about 100 pounds. There was still
more: Charles discovered a packet of salt and (“Une
fameuse trouvaille!'") a can of water of perhaps twelve
gallons, frozen in a block.

We loaded everything on to a small cart (formerly

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The Story of Ten Days

used to distribute the rations for the huts; there were
a great number of them abandoned everywhere), and
we turned back, toiling over the snow.

We contented ourselves that day with boiled potatoes
again and slices of turnips roasted on the stove, but
Arthur promised important innovations for the following
day.

In the afternoon I went to the ex-surgery, searching
for anything that might prove of use. I had been
preceded: everything had been upset by inexpert looters.
Not a bottle intact, the floor covered by a layer of
rags, excrement and medicaments. A naked, contorted
corpse. But there was something that had escaped my
predecessors: a battery from a lorry. I touched the
poles with a knife — a small spark. It was charged.

That evening we had light in our room.

Sitting in bed, I could see a large stretch of the
road through the window. For the past three days the
Wehrmacht in flight passed by in waves. Armoured
cars, tiger tanks camouflaged in white, Germans on
horseback, Germans on bicycle, Germans on foot, armed
and unarmed. During the night, long before the tanks
came into sight, one could hear the grinding of their
tracks.

Charles asked: l %a route encore?”

“<^a route toujours.”

It seemed as if it would never end.

January 21st. Instead it ended. On the dawn of
the 21st we saw the plain deserted and lifeless, white
as far as the eye could see, lying under the flight of the
crows, deathly sad. I would almost have preferred to
see something moving again. The Polish civilians had
also disappeared, hiding who knows where. Even the
wind seemed to have stopped. I wanted only one thing:

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If This is a Man

to stay in bed under my blankets and abandon myself
to a complete exhaustion of muscles, nerve and willpower;
waiting as indifferently as a dead man for it to end or
not to end.

But Charles had already lighted the stove, Charles,
our active, trusting, alive friend, and he called me to
work:

“Vas-y, Primo, descends-toi de la-haut; il y a Jules
cl attraper par les oreilles..."

“Jules” was the lavatory bucket, which every morning
had to be taken by its handles, carried outside and
emptied into the cesspool; this was the first task of the
day, and if one remembers that it was impossible to wash
one’s hands and that three of us were ill with typhus, it
can be understood that it was not a pleasant job.

We had to inaugurate the cabbages and turnips.
While I went to search for wood and Charles collected
the snow for water, Arthur mobilized the patients who
could sit up to help with the peeling. Towarowski,
Sertelet, Alcalai and Schenck answered the call.

Sertelet was also a peasant from the Vosges, twenty
years old; he seemed in good shape, but day by day
his voice assumed an ever more sinister nasal timbre,
reminding us that diphtheria seldom relaxes its hold.

Alcalai was a Jewish glazier from Toulouse; he was
quiet and discreet, and suffered from erysipelas on the
face.

Schenk was a Slovak businessman, Jewish; a typhus
patient, he had a formidable appetite. Likewise Towa¬
rowski, a Franco-Polish Jew, stupid and talkative, but
useful to our community through his communicative
optimism.

So while the patients scraped with their knives, each
one seated on his bunk, Charles and I devoted ourselves
to finding a suitable site for the kitchen operations. An

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The Story of Ten Days

indescribable filth had invaded every part of the camp.
All the latrines were overflowing, as naturally nobody
cared any more about their upkeep, and those suffering
from dysentery (more than a hundred) had fouled every
corner of Ka-Be, filling all the buckets, all the bowls
formerly used for the rations, all the pots. One could
not move an inch without watching one’s step; in the
dark it was impossible to move around. Although
suffering from the cold, which remained acute, we
thought with horror of what would happen if it thawed:
the diseases would spread irreparably, the stench would
be suffocating, and even more, with the snow melted
we would remain definitively without water.

After a long search we finally found a small area
of floor not excessively soiled in a spot formerly used
for the laundry. We lit a live fire to save time and
complications and disinfected our hands, rubbing them
with chloramine mixed with snow.

The news that a soup was being cooked spread rapidly
through the crowd of the semi-living; a throng of starved
faces gathered at the door. Charles, with ladle uplifted,
made a short, vigorous speech, which although in French
needed no translation.

The majority dispersed but one came forward. He
was a Parisian, a high-class tailor (he said), suffering
from tuberculosis. In exchange for two pints of soup
he offered to make us clothes from the many blankets
still to be found in the camp.

Maxime showed himself really able. The following
day Charles and I were in possession of a jacket, trousers
and gloves of a rough fabric of striking colours.

In the evening, after the first soup, distributed with
enthusiasm and devoured with greed, the great silence
of the plain was broken. From our bunks, too tired
to be really worried, we listened to the bangs of

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If This is a Man

mysterious artillery groups apparently hidden on all the
points of the horizon, and to the whisde of the shells
over our heads.

I was thinking that life was beautiful and would
be beautiful again, and that it would really be a pity
to let ourselves be overcome now. 1 woke up the patients
who were dozing and when I was sure that they were
all listening I told them, first in French and then in my
best German, that they must all begin to think of
returning home now, and that as far as depended on us,
certain things were to be done and others to be avoided.
Each person should carefully look after his own bowl
and spoon; no one should offer his own soup to others;
no one should climb down from his bed except to go to
the latrine; if anyone was in need of anything, he should
only turn to us three. Arthur in particular was given
the task of supervizing the discipline and hygiene, and
was to remember that it was better to leave bowls and
spoons dirty rather than wash them with the danger
of changing those of a diphtheria patient with those
of someone suffering from typhus.

I had the impression that the patients by now were
too indifferent to everything to pay attention to what I
had said; but I had great faith in Arthur’s diligence.

January 22nd. If it is courageous to face a grave
danger with a light heart, Charles and I were courageous
that morning. We extended our explorations to the SS
camp, immediately outside the electric wire-fence.

The camp guards must have left in a great hurry.
On the tables we found plates half-full of a by-now
frozen soup which we devoured with an intense pleasure,
mugs full of beer, transformed into a yellowish ice, a
chess board with an unfinished game. In the dormitories,
piles of valuable things.

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The Story of Ten Days

We loaded ourselves with a bottle of vodka, various
medicines, newspapers and magazines and four first-rate
eiderdowns, one of which is today in my house in Turin.
Cheerful and irresponsible, we carried the fruits of our
expedition back to the dormitory, leaving them in
Arthur’s care. Only that evening did we learn what
happened perhaps only half an hour later.

Some SS men, perhaps dispersed, but still armed,
penetrated into the abandoned camp. They found that
eighteen Frenchmen had settled in the dining-hall of
the SS-Waffe. They killed them all methodically, with
a shot in the nape of the neck, lining up their twisted
bodies in the snow on the road; then they left. The
eighteen corpses remained exposed until the arrival of
the Russians; nobody had the strength to bury them.

But by now there were beds in all the huts occupied
by corpses as rigid as wood, whom nobody troubled to
remove. The ground was too frozen to dig graves;
many bodies were piled up in a trench, but already
early on the heap showed out of the hole and was
shamefully visible from our window.

Only a wooden wall separated us from the ward
of the dysentery patients, where many were dying and
many dead. The floor was covered by a layer of frozen
excrement. None of the patients had strength enough
to climb out of their blankets to search for food, and
those who had done it at the beginning had not returned
to help their comrades. In one bed, clasping each other
to resist the cold better, there were two Italians. I often
heard them talking, but as I spoke only French, for a
long time they were not aware of my presence. That
day they heard my name by chance, pronounced with
an Italian accent by Charles, and from then on they
never ceased groaning and imploring.

Naturally I would have liked to have helped them,

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If This is a Man

given the means and the strength, if for no other reason
than to stop their crying. In the evening when all the
work was finished, conquering my tiredness and disgust,
I dragged myself gropingly along the dark, filthy corridor
to their ward with a bowl of water and the remainder of
our day’s soup. The result was that from then on, through
the thin wall, the whole diarrhoea ward shouted my
name day and night with the accents of all the languages
of Europe, accompanied by incomprehensible prayers,
without my being able to do anything about it. I felt
like crying, I could have cursed them.

The night held ugly surprises.

Lakmaker, in the bunk under mine, was a poor
wreck of a man. He was (or had been) a Dutch Jew,
seventeen years old, tall, thin and gentle. He had been
in bed for three months; I have no idea how he had
managed to survive the selections. He had had typhus
and scarlet fever successively; at the same time a serious
cardiac illness had shown itself, while he was smothered
with bedsores, so much so that by now he could only
lie on his stomach. Despite all this, he had a ferocious
appetite. He only spoke Dutch, and none of us could
understand him.

Perhaps the cause of it all was the cabbage and
turnip soup, of which Lakmaker had wanted two
helpings. In the middle of the night he groaned and
then threw himself from his bed. He tried to reach
the latrine, but was too weak and fell to the ground,
crying and shouting loudly.

Charles lit the lamp (the battery showed itself
providential) and we were able to ascertain the gravity
of the incident. The boy’s bed and the floor were
filthy. The smell in the small area was rapidly becoming
insupportable. We had but a minimum supply of water

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The Story of Ten Days

and neither blankets nor straw mattresses to spare. And
the poor wretch, suffering from typhus, formed a terrible
source of infection, while he could certainly not be left
all night to groan and shiver in the cold in the middle
of the filth.

Charles climbed down from his bed and dressed in
silence. While I held the lamp, he cut all the dirty
patches from the straw mattress and the blankets with
a knife. He lifted Lakmaker from the ground with the
tenderness of a mother, cleaned him as best as possible
with straw taken from the mattress and lifted him into
the remade bed in the only position in which the
unfortunate fellow could lie. He scraped the floor with
a scrap of tinplate, diluted a little chloramine, and
finally spread disinfectant over everything, including
himself.

I judged his self-sacrifice by the tiredness which I
would have had to overcome in myself to do what he
had done.

January 23rd. Our potatoes were finished. For days
past the rumour had circulated through all the huts
that an enormous trench of potatoes lay somewhere
outside the barbed wire, not far from the camp.

Some unknown pioneer must have carried out patient
explorations, or else someone knew the spot with
precision. In fact, by the morning of the 23rd a section
of the barbed wire had been beaten down and a double
file of wretches went in and out through the opening.

Charles and I left, into the wind of the leaden plain.
We were beyond the broken barrier.

“Dis done, Primo, on est dehors!”

It was exactly like that; for the first time since the
day of my arrest I found myself free, without armed
guards, without wire fences between myself and home.

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If This is a Man

Perhaps 400 yards from the camp lay the potatoes —
a treasure. Two extremely long ditches, full of potatoes
and covered by alternate layers of soil and straw to
protect them from the cold. Nobody would die of
hunger any more.

But to extract them was by no means easy work. The
cold had made the surface of the earth as hard as iron.
By strenuous work with a pickaxe it was possible to
break the crust and lay bare the deposit; but the majority
preferred to work the holes abandoned by others and
continue to deepen them, passing the potatoes to their
companions standing outside.

An old Hungarian had been surprised there by death.
He lay there like hunger personified: head and shoulders
under a pile of earth, belly in the snow, hands stretched
out towards the potatoes. Someone came later and
moved the body about a yard, so freeing the hole.

From then on our food improved. Besides boiled
potatoes and potato soup, we offered our patients potato
pancakes, on Arthur’s recipe: rub together raw potatoes
with boiled, soft ones, and roast the mixture on a red-hot
iron-plate. They tasted of soot.

But Sertelet, steadily getting worse, was unable to
enjoy them. Besides speaking with an ever more nasal
tone, that day he was unable to force down any food;
something had closed up in his throat, every mouthful
threatened to suffocate him.

I went to look for a Hungarian doctor left as a
patient in the hut in front. When he heard the word
diphtheria he started back and ordered me to leave.

For pure propaganda purposes I gave everyone nasal
drops of camphorated oil. I assured Sertelet that they
would help him; I even tried to convince myself.

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The Story of Ten Days

January 24th. Liberty. The breach in the barbed
wire gave us a concrete image of it. To anyone who
stopped to think, it signified no more Germans, no more
selections, no work, no blows, no roll-calls, and perhaps,
later, the return.

But we had to make an effort to convince ourselves
of it, and no one had time to enjoy the thought. All
around lay destruction and death.

The pile of corpses in front of our window had by
now overflowed out of the ditch. Despite the potatoes
everyone was extremely weak: not a patient in the
camp improved, while many fell ill with pneumonia
and diarrhoea; those who were unable to move themselves,
or lacked the energy to do so, lay lethargic in their
bunks, benumbed by the cold, and nobody realized when
they died.

The others were all incredibly tired: after months
and years of the Lager it needs more than potatoes to give
back strength to a man. Charles and I, as soon as we
had dragged the fifty pints of daily soup from the
laundry to our room, threw ourselves panting on the
bunks, while Arthur, with that domesticated air of his,
diligently divided the food, taking care to save the
three rations of “rabiot pour les travailleurs" and a little
of the sediment “pour les italiens d'a cote."

In the second room of the contagious ward, likewise
adjoining ours and occupied mainly by tuberculosis
patients, the situation was quite different. All those
who were able to had gone to other huts. Their weakest
comrades and those who were most seriously ill died one
by one in solitude.

I went in there one morning to try and borrow a
needle. A patient was wheezing in one of the upper
bunks. He heard me, struggled to sit up, then fell
dangling, head downwards over the edge towards me,

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If This is a Man

with his chest and arms stiff and his eyes white. The man
in the bunk below automatically stretched up his arms to
support the body and then realized that he was dead.
He slowly withdrew from under the weight and the
body slid to the ground where it remained. Nobody knew
his name.

But in hut 14 something new had happened. It was
occupied by patients recovering from operations, some
of them quite healthy. They organized an expedition
to the English prisoner-of-war camp, which it was assumed
had been evacuated. It proved a fruitful expedition.
They returned dressed in khaki with a cart full of
wonders never seen before: margarine, custard powders,
lard, soya-bean flour, whisky.

That evening there was singing in hut 14.

None of us felt strong enough to walk the one mile
to the English camp and return with a load. But
indirectly the fortunate expedition proved of advantage
to many. The unequal division of goods caused a
reflourishing of industry and commerce. Our room,
with its lethal atmosphere, transformed itself into a
factory of candles poured into cardboard moulds, with
wicks soaked in boracic acid. The riches of hut 14
absorbed our entire production, paying us in lard and
flour.

I myself had found the block of beeswax in the
elektro magazirr, I remember the expression of disappoint¬
ment of those who saw me carry it away and the dialogue
that followed:

“What do you want to do with that?”

It was inadvisable to reveal a shop secret; I heard
myself replying with the words I had often heard
spoken by the old ones of the camp, expressing their
favourite boast — of being hardboiled, “old hands,”

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The Story of Ten Days

who always knew how to find their feet: “Ich verstehe
verscbiedene Sacked I know how to do many things...

January 25th. It was Somogyi’s turn. He was a
Hungarian chemist, about fifty years old, thin, tall and
taciturn. Like the Dutchman he suffered from typhus
and scarlet fever. He had not spoken for perhaps five
days; that day he opened his mouth and said in a firm
voice:

“I have a ration of bread under the sack. Divide
it among you three. I shall not be eating anymore.”

We could not find anything to say, but for the time
being we did not touch the bread. Half his face had
swollen. As long as he retained consciousness he
remained closed in a harsh silence.

But in the evening and for the whole of the night
and for two days without interruption the silence was
broken by his delirium. Following a last interminable
dream of acceptance and slavery he began to murmur:
“ Jawohl ” with every breath, regularly and continuously
like a machine, “ Jawohl," at every collapsing of his
wretched frame, thousands of times, enough to make
one want to shake him, to suffocate him, at least to
make him change the word.

I never understood so clearly as at that moment how
laborious is the death of a man.

Outside the great silence continued. The number
of ravens had increased considerably and everybody knew
why. Only at distant intervals did the dialogue of the
artillery wake up.

We all said to each other that the Russians would
arrive soon, at once; we all proclaimed it, we were
all sure of it, but at bottom nobody believed it.
Because one loses the habit of hoping in the Lager, and
even of believing in one’s own reason. In the Lager it is

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If This is a Man

useless to think, because events happen for the most
part in an unforeseeable manner; and it is harmful,
because it keeps alive a sensitivity which is a source of
pain, and which some providential natural law dulls
when suffering passes a certain limit.

Like joy, fear and pain itself, even expectancy can
be tiring. Having reached January 25th, with all relations
broken already for eight days with that ferocious world
that still remained a world, most of us were too exhausted
even to wait.

In the evening, around the stove, Charles, Arthur and
I felt ourselves become men once again. We could
speak of everything. I grew enthusiastic at Arthur’s
account of how one passed the Sunday at Provencheres
in the Vosges, and Charles almost cried when I told
him the story of the armistice in Italy, of the turbid and
desperate beginning of the Partisan resistance, of the
man who betrayed us and of our capture in the mountains.

In the darkness, behind and above us, the eight
invalids did not lose a syllable, even those who did not
understand French. Only Somogyi implacably confirmed
his dedication to death.

January 26th. We lay in a world of death and
phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished
around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation,
begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its
conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers
injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all
restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits
for his neighbour to die in order to take his piece of
bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of
thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most
vicious sadist.

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The Story of Ten Days

Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those
near to us. This is why the experience of someone who
has lived for days during which man was merely a thing
in the eyes of man is non-human. We three were for
the most part immune from it, and we owe each other
mutual gratitude. This is why my friendship with Charles
will prove lasting.

But thousands of feet above us, in the gaps
in the grey clouds, the complicated miracles of aerial
duels began. Above us, bare, helpless and unarmed,
men of our time sought reciprocal death with the most
refined of instruments. A movement of a finger could
cause the destruction of the entire camp, could annihilate
thousands of men; while the sum total of all our efforts
and exertions would not be sufficient to prolong by one
minute the life of even one of us.

The saraband stopped at night and the room was
once again filled with Somogyi's monologue.

In full darkness I found myself suddenly awake.
U L’pauv’vieux” was silent; he had finished. With the
last gasp of life, he had thrown himself to the ground:
I heard the thud of his knees, of his hips, of his
shoulders, of his head.

“La mort l’a chasse de son lit,” Arthur defined it.

We certainly could not carry him out during the
night. There was nothing for it but to go back to
sleep again.

January 27th. Dawn. On the floor, the shameful
wreck of skin and bones, the Somogyi thing.

There are more urgent tasks: we cannot wash
ourselves, so that we dare not touch him until we have
cooked and eaten. And besides: “ ...rien de si degoutant
que les debordements ” said Charles justly; the latrine

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If This is a Man

had to be emptied. The living are more demanding;
the dead can wait. We began to work as on every day.

The Russians arrived while Charles and I were
carrying Somogyi a little distance outside. He was very
light. We overturned the stretcher on the grey snow.

Charles took off his beret. I regretted not having
a beret.

Of the eleven of the Infektionsabteilung Somogyi
was the only one to die in the ten days. Sertelet,
Cagnolati, Towarowski, Lakmaker and Dorget (I have
not spoken of him so far; he was a French industrialist
who, after an operation for peritonitis, fell ill of nasal
diphtheria) died some weeks later in the temporary
Russian hospital of Auschwitz. In April, at Katowice,
I met Schenck and Alcalai in good health. Arthur has
reached his family happily and Charles has taken up
his teacher’s profession again; we have exchanged long
letters and I hope to see him again one day.